Ethical Ideals in India To-day

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“There is a spirit, which I feel, that delights to do no evil nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none; in thoughts to any other. If it is betrayed, it bears it. . . . It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world’s joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places.”

---- Thomas Naylor, of the Society of Friends. “His last testimony, said to be delivered by him about two hours before his Departure.”

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When your Committee honoured me with their invitation I hesitated to accept it. Events have given me some share in the Indian controversy of our time, and I supposed I should take an Indian theme. But on India I have spoken and written so much that I felt I had little to say that was new.

But on consideration it seemed possible to throw some light on the ideas of Indian political leaders. The political movement is now so widespread that we can rarely say of any prominent Indian that he is not in some fashion and in some crises a political figure. For that matter, few of us in any land can assert that we are not interested in politics, for politics overshadow all things. Even those ideas that stand eternal, above all politics, are threatened with submergence for a period beyond the power of anyone to contemplate, without wretchedness, because of events in the political sphere. Yet ideas keep their importance and still govern men’s actions.

The Indian political movement of the last thirty years has been peculiarly dependent on ideas. In them men have found not only inspiration, but methods of strategy and tactics; in times of defeat and humiliation they have taken refuge in their contemplation. The ideas have been to those whom they inspired greater than their success or failure, greater than the deeds in which they found expression. They have seemed to hold in themselves something significant for other lands than India. India, these men believed, could win by their faithful service her own Independence. But if this effort failed, the ideas remained of sovereign worth and validity.

A man who has an outstanding claim to be remembered in this hall and by this audience was the founder of India’s modern political consciousness. The first Indian of high caste to visit Europe, Rammohan Roy came ostensibly as a politician. He was the accredited representative of the King of Delhi---as the descendant of the Mogul Emperors was then styled---in his attempt to appeal over the heads of the Directors of the East India Company to the British King. His visit was resented by the Indian Government, his personality and qualities belittled, and he was unable to achieve much for his own King. But Rammohan Roy’s vision went out far beyond the Mogul dynasty or even India. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, who in a very special sense was his disciple and fulfiller of his mission and message, he was “the first man and the greatest who realized this truth . . . which had been proclaimed in the shade of India’s forest solitude,” the truth of the unity of all mankind. This truth even now “is waiting to bring reconciliation to the men who are fighting in the dark and have lost the recognition of their brotherhood.” “He held up high the pure light of the Upanishads that shows the path whereby the conquerors of the self ‘enter into the heart of the all’---the light which is not for rejection, but for comprehension.” ¹

Rammohan Roy was a Theist. In India and England he found his first and best friends among the Unitarian Christians, and his catholicity and quick acceptance of truth wherever he found it made him one of the founders of the science of comparative religion, as well as of India’s own noble Theistic society, the Brahmo Samaj. His mission seemed to fail, but did not fail. In this country he did humanity service, by his advice ensuring the support, against the protest of nine hundred of his own countrymen, of Lord William Bentinck’s abolition of the rite of sahamaran or widow-burning. Rammohan Roy’s outstanding greatness has yet to be recognized; he was one of the two or three greatest men of the whole world during the nineteenth century. He died in Bristol, in 1833, to the last tended with all that affection and reverence could do. The permanence and ultimate recovery of his work were entrusted by God to his friend. Dwarkanath Tagore, whose son Debendranath refounded the Brahmo Samaj and whose grandson Rabindranath carried its teaching to its logical fullness and completion.

So far as politics in India were concerned, however, Rammohan Roy was one of those who, in De Quincey’s phrase, are “the dead who died before the dawn.” He saw far into the future, as hardly any have ever done, and then put by, as not for his ow time, all questions of political advancement for his people, while he strove for their social and ethical enlightenment.

In Rammohan Roy’s mission to London the enfeebled Mogul dynasty made its last effort to assert equality with the British Crown as a sovereign power. It still claimed suzerainty in India,, with good legal grounds in its treaties with the East India Company, but it ceased to look outside India, and even in India its day was finished. As for the smaller Indian kingdoms, in the two decades which followed Rammohan Roy’s death they entered on their own last phase of Independence. In 1843 the State of Gwalior tried to break out of the net of British control; and the Sikh State of the Punjab attempted to keep still free, in two desperate wars, in 1845 and 1848. Finally, in 1857, there was the wild outburst known to our historians as the Mutiny. This was the end of the older Indian Nationalism.

A quarter of a century passed after the Mutiny was crushed, before the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885. For its first thirty years or so, the Congress acted on lines made familiar by Nationalist movements in Western lands. It used methods based on constitutional approaches to reform, so far as these were possible in India; and then, as the century was closing, its revolutionary wing tried the more violent methods that had been used to escape from dependence in Europe and the Americas. Neither of these attained any but an extremely limited success.

All this was changed by one man, Mohandas Karimchand Gandhi.

Mr. Gandhi’s first actions were undoubtedly due in considerable measure to what he had read of political action in Britain. The lessons of this action were reinforced by study of such authors as Tolstoi and Ruskin, though their influence on him has often been exaggerated. Nevertheless, Ruskin laid bare for him at a crisis in his early life the simplicities of Indian thought and existence, which are often hidden from Indians themselves. When he read Unto This Last, thirty-five years ago, it brought about “an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life.” He resolved henceforward to live as a peasant. “I could not sleep that night. I determined to change my life in the light of the book.”² From it he learnt these lessons:---

The good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

A lawyer’s labour has the same value as the barber’s, inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their labour.

A life of labour---i.e., of the tiller of the soil and handicraftsman---is the life worth living.

The first of these three truths, he says, he knew already: the second he had dimly realized; the third had never occurred to him. They cut right across the doctrines of caste and class. “I awoke with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice.” In this resolution were contained the seeds of two of his later beliefs and habits: his effort to abolish untouchability (setting the example by adopting an untouchable girl), and his custom of having in his own house a hospital of the sick and of doing the dirtiest work, that reserved for untouchables, with his own hands.

He had already raised and served with an Indian ambulance unit in the Boer War. He believed the Boers, as against the British, were fighting for Independence. But, since Indians were claiming the rights of citizens, he considered it logical to show they were willing to do the work of citizens. “I then believed that the British Empire existed for the welfare of the world. A genuine sense of loyalty prevented me from wishing ill to the Empire.”³

This feeling made him raise an ambulance unit for what was styled the Zulu Rebellion, in 1907. The wounded they had to tend, however, had not been wounded in battle. They were men who had been flogged under martial law, and whose hurts from neglect were festering. This experience proved another turning-point in his thought, and brought home the horrors of war far more vividly than the Boer campaign had done. “This was no war,” he says, “but a man-hunt, not only in my opinion, but also in that of many Englishmen with whom I had occasion to talk.” Few men have ever been greater and more courageous than Gandhi in South Africa. He began to see that his lifework was to be a harder and more rigorous thing than he had ever imagined. His mind turned not merely to infinite pity and a compassion that was all-absorbing, but to complete self-control. Marching, with or without wounded to care for, through what he calls the “solemn solitudes” of the veldt, Gandhi tells us he pondered over Brahmacharya and its implications.

Brahmacharya, strictly speaking, is the strict continence, especially sexual, demanded of a student, and a student’s subservience and humility of mind. One characteristic of Gandhi’s moral genius is the way in which he has continually taken some Sanskrit term that had become stereotyped and fixed in its meaning, and has given it a wider application. He tells us he is not a Sanskrit scholar, and of course this is so. But, even if he were, it is not in him to be verbally pedantic. He made himself, as an essential foundation for his service to India, a student again, under rigid physical as well as mental discipline. “I had not realized how indispensable continence was for self-realization, but I clearly saw that one aspiring to serve humanity with his whole soul could not do without it. . . . I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit.” He took a final vow to be free of the demands of the body, and with this decision entered on something like the mystic’s ecstasy. “The prospect of the vow brought a certain kind of exultation.” He was now ready for his first successful struggle against authority, the Satyagraha, with which he and his followers opposed the humiliations and restrictions placed on Indians by South African Governments.

Satyagraha Gandhi himself translates as “Soul Force or Truth Force.” The word is made up, somewhat irregularly perhaps, of two Sanskrit words, satya, truth, and graha, a taking grip of. I find in it not only Hindu thought but something which is far more widely and deeply existent in India than anyone seems to have suspected, the influence of Buddhist teaching. That influence came to Gandhi, at first, I think, unconsciously, as part of the Indian air he breathed; it is something pervasive throughout Northern India. To-day he often answers to it consciously. Syncretism and acceptance of influences from all sources have always been of the very essence of India, and not even Tagore has been more susceptible, in a completely individual and original manner, to whatever appealed to his sense of right and truth---for his thinking, striking as it is, is moral rather than strictly intellectual---than Gandhi has consistently been.

This hidden survival of Buddhist doctrine in India is something which has never been investigated. To seek to trace it now would be beyond my theme or abilities. But I will point out one fact which strikes me as suggestive of how great was once the hold of Buddhism on India. It does not appear to have been noticed that when Buddhism lost its place in India and became instead established outside India, it rejected Hinduism’s metaphysics but took over popular belief and folklore. The test example is the doctrine of Transmigration. The Hindu doctrine, as you know, is that each existence is the sum and fruition of the karma, or action, of the preceding existences. At death this existence ends, and the self passes into dissolution, emerging as a new self which is the logical inexorable result of the new karma. To the eye of eternal infinite Logic, if such an eye exists, the new self is seen as the fruit of the dead self, though this is visible to no other eye. It is as if a rose should disintegrate and re-emerge as a lily, in logical fulfilment of its life and actions during its period of rosehood.

Hindu popular belief, however, is simpler and more naīve, moving less in the realm of an austere metaphysics than in that of fairy legend. It is from this world of popular belief that Buddhism---in leaving India taking with it the roots of village life, as it were---has gathered its concept of something we can style genuine Reincarnation, of a self clothing itself with a new body. Surely this adoption of folk thought, rather than philosophic, suggests that Buddhism, though its founder was an aristocrat, was essentially a peasant movement---as, indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that it was.

Gandhi is essentially a peasant. Forty years ago, as we have seen, he deliberately adopted a peasant’s life and outlook; and to-day he wants to rebuild India on the basis of an essentially peasant civilization. He came originally, not from one of the great cities, but from a completely rustic district in one of the most minor of India’s hundreds of completely minor native States. He has read Hindu Scriptures, and they have fed his mind. But he has always been in close accord with the peasant mind, and with that vast floating traditional knowledge and, still more, emotion which carries down to the present day what is now history. No mind living can pick out what is history. Yet it is history, and history that reaches very far, into “the dark backward and abysm of Time,” and goes back to Indian beginnings.

Gandhi has been consciously stirred by much that is Buddhist thought and doctrine. For example, by the stories of the Buddha’s previous incarnations in which he gave his body in pity for all---once even to feed a starving tiger. To us in the West such a story may seem merely grotesque and absurd. We have arrogated to ourselves such absolute sway over the lower forms of life that they are thought of as having been created to provide us with meat and robes or a picturesque background, or simply what is styled sport. To the Indian, who sees Eternal Purpose working out its own fulfilment in every form that has life, even those which to us seem merely noxious, such stories do not seem absurd at all. There have been times when Gandhi has desired, with a passion that at any rate St. Paul would have understood, to give his own life to bring life to India. There has been this sacrificial thought in his fasts, and to close friends he has sometimes cited the Buddha’s example.

There have, of course, been other strands of thought in those fasts---strands of thought that were not Buddhist at all, but essentially Hindu. The fasts have been an application to our day of the ancient custom of “sitting dharnā.” Dharnā is a verbal form, best translated as a gripping or seizing. This custom in the early days of British rule was very hard for authority to deal with. An aggrieved person or a creditor would sit in siege, fasting, at the door of the man who had wronged him, until reparation or death released him from his self-imposed task. If it were death that effected this release, then his ghost sat on implacable, now beyond the reach of redress or appeal. Gandhi, when he adopted passive resistance (sometimes reinforcing it with a fast), sat dharnā on the threshold of the British Empire in India, a process which he continued during the decade or so which followed on the Amritsar massacre of April, 1919. Had he died as the result of one of his fasts, the effect on Indian opinion would have been catastrophic. As an Indian whose co-operation has lifted the Government out of some of its worst difficulties once observed to me, “I am a modern and I think in the European way. But I tell you, while Gandhi is fasting I cannot help feeling in myself a surge of tremendous emotion and excitement.”

Also, India has always attached a peculiar significance to dying deeds and protests. The last words of a sati, before dying on her husband’s pyre, were held to be binding. When the wives of the executed Wazir of the Punjab were forced on to his pyre, in 1845, the destruction of the Army of the Khalsa in the ensuing war with the British was by many ascribed to the curse of one of these unfortunate women. In the Mutiny year of 1857, at a time when the British Government were in no position to enforce social regulations, the widow of the Bhinai Raja in Ajmer burned herself with her husband in defiance of the law against suttee, and with her last words denounced a cess which had been imposed to pay for education. The cess had to be removed. Superstition, of course! Yet I remember, when after Munich the Czechoslovak Government had to accept the surrender of their cause and independence and in a final broadcast of surpassing dignity said “We bequeath our sorrow to the French and British nations,” I remarked toa friend, “That legacy, at any rate, will get to its destination.” It has done, as we know.

Gandhi’s sitting dharnā, however, like the hartals or general abstentions from work which he used to arrange twenty years ago, has been largely his own individual revival of Indian methods of protest, with modifications due to his study of such modern Western actions as the Passive Resistance of Nonconformists to Mr. Balfour’s Education Act, and the hunger-striking of Suffragists and Irish rebels. Sitting dharnā has taken me somewhat apart from my present theme, the character of his satyagraha or soul-force. Great stress is laid by him on absolute truthfulness, as perhaps the most essential strand in satyagraha action. By this truthfulness he means something that transcends mere verbal accuracy, which is a very trivial part of it. The satyagrahi’s action has to be based on an utter and all-embracing integrity, which takes up into his action the whole man---as a white-hot fire grips and absorbs into one incandescence the whole of the fuel that feeds it. It has to be nishkām, “ desireless,” without thought of reward or possible result or of its effect on the self at all---and this strain of thought, of course, is from the Gita, Gandhi’s favourite Hindu Scripture. But the whole deed of the satyagrahi is really what the devout Buddhist knows as “an Act of Truth.” It is an Act such as St. Paul achieved on the Damascus road, when he turned in instantaneous revulsion from his whole past, asking, “Lord, what wilt thou have me do?” It is the kind of action we find, not in those who are meticulously and pedantically accurate in speech, but in those rare characters whose whole life proceeds from principles so deeply and firmly established that their application is automatic. Yet there is in it thought and intelligence all the time. Perhaps the world’s perfect satyagrahi was Socrates, who was nishkām, desireless, where his own convenience or safety was concerned, and whose integrity showed in an unquestioning obedience to his daemon.

I should like to elaborate this a little. In a well-known passage, the Buddha says that in all we do, whether we rise or sit, if we merely extend the arm, we must let mind be the master. We must act with our whole being alert and watchful. That is the quality of the satyagrahi's Act of Truth.

Satyagraha in action was based on Civil Disobedience---the refusal to pay taxes or cooperate by taking service under Government---and on Non-Violence. Gandhi will live in history as one of the very few who have set on an epoch the stamp of an Idea. That Idea has been Non-Violence, and he set its stamp not merely on his own movement⁴ but very largely on the repressive action of the Government which he opposed. For, when all has been summed up, despite one terrible episode and many lesser episodes that were deeply distressing, in comparison with nationalist struggles in other lands the struggle in India has been moderately civilized, as conducted by both sides.

We might feel inclined to find something of Buddhist influence in his doctrine of Non-Violence also, and no doubt the influence of the Buddha helped. But so did the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, which he interprets as pacifist. But we do not need to look for any sources of what came to him naturally, as if by birthright, and was reinforced by so much in his experience. His own nation, the Gujarati, historically have been one of India’s less martial races; and Hindu India generally believes profoundly in ahimsā, harmlessness. Ahimsā is the Sanskrit word Gandhi translates as Non-Violence.

Gandhi’s methods, of course, were evolved gradually, by trial and rejection. They were adopted after two decades marked by abundant violence, both in India and the outside world---a period which included the First World War. As a political weapon, Civil Disobedience based on Non-Violence achieved remarkable results. It was the only weapon which a disarmed people, of which great sections had by long disuse lost whatever martial qualities their ancestors might have once possessed, could hope to wield with success. But the weapon was new, apart from Gandhi’s first trials of it in South Africa. Its considerable success in India was because it was wielded against a Government which, with all its faults, had a conscience, and sometimes an uneasy conscience. It is no wonder that as the years passed Gandhi more and more rested his faith in this creed of Non-Violence. Yet, as the period of nervous and physical exhaustion which followed the First World War rose into a fiercer and more aggressive age, I think Non-Violence ceased to possess all the virtues he ascribed to it. It is certain that under any one of the totalitarian regimes the fact that his opposition was non-violent would not have saved Gandhi and his disciples from a firing-squad. This fact, it is only fair to say, would not have affected Gandhi’s action, nor would his creed’s political failure. He is willing to wait through many generations for India’s Independence. More and more, to him the strict preservation of Non-Violence has been more important than its results.

I think, however, that the political value of Non-Violence in India has finished. When Gandhi asserted that if the Ethiopians had not resisted the Italian invaders they would not have been conquered, and that England would have done well to invite Hitler to do without resistance whatever he desired, no doubt he was logical and true to his faith; I doubt if the aggressors would have been as deeply moved to compassion and admiration as he believed. But in India, at any rate, Non-Violence has done a mighty work, and if Hitler were Lord Halifax, the Viceroy against whom Non-Violence was most fully tried out, it might have done good work in Europe also. At all events, the policy of Appeasement went some way in the true Non-Violent direction; the Czechs gave up their freedom without resistance, without placating the Nazis.

Perhaps the earliest criticism of Gandhi’s ideas came from the man whom of all India he most desired to win to his side, Rabindranath Tagore the poet. It was Tagore’s opposition, patriot and nationalist though he was, that caused the first Civil Disobedience Movement, in 1920 and 1921, to fail in Bengal. I was told at the time that the Bengal National Congress leader, Chittaranjan Das, used to close each busy day with a kind of full-dress commination service against Tagore. Tagore’s objections to the Movement were twofold. First, he always insisted that the scientific achievement of the West, however perverted to material and even brutal ends, was essentially a spiritual achievement, as spiritual as anything India had achieved in religion and philosophy, and that India could not do without the West. He felt that Gandhi’s thought, powerful and ethical though it was, was provincial, was bounded too much by India and by consideration of India, and that the old national boundaries were mischievous and their day was over. Secondly, holding as strongly as Gandhi that all force was wrong, he held also that the spirit of boycott on which Civil Disobedience rested was only technically non-violent, a point of view to which Gandhi himself came largely in later days. But Tagore’s chief objection was to what he styled the “mendicancy” of Indian politics. Indian politicians, he held, were obsessed by the Government even when they were fighting it. They became opposition-minded, they waited always on Government action, and then, when it came, rarely had any positive or constructive policy; they merely blocked and stonewalled. This attitude he called one of mendicancy, a constant looking for boons and then rejecting the boons as meagre and inadequate. Gandhi’s fasts, I think, seemed to him to come under the head of “mendicancy.” They recalled the ancient legends, of ascetics who fasted until they had wrested some gift from the gods, who gave to the appeal of indigence and helplessness---perhaps despairingly, perhaps with a touch of almost scorn---what strength and vigour of action had not been able to win, indeed had not attempted to win. Independence, Tagore insisted, could not come as a gift from an outside power. It was something that flowered within a people’s spirit; when it came to flower it was won. “I believe,” he wrote in 1922, in reply to a Gujarati poet who addressed to him an Open Letter,

in the efficacy of ahimsā as the means of overcoming the congregated might of physical force on which the political powers in all countries mainly rest. But like every other moral principle ahimsā has to spring from the depth of mind, and it must not be forced upon man from some outside appeal of urgent need. The great personalities of the world have preached love, forgiveness, and non-violence, primarily for the sake of spiritual perfection and not for the attainment of some immediate success in politics or other similar departments of life. They were aware of the difficulty of their teaching being realized within a fixed period of time in a sudden and wholesale manner by men whose previous course of life had chiefly pursued the course of self. No doubt, through a strong compulsion of desire for some external result, men are capable of repressing their habitual inclinations for a limited time; but when it concerns an immense multitude of men of different traditions and stages of culture, and when the object for which such repression is exercised needs a prolonged period of struggle, complex in character, I cannot think it possible of attainment.

He thought that Gandhi was trying to win the kingdom of the spirit by the shock employment of material means. When stress was laid on the daily use by everyone of the charkā or spinning-wheel, he asked one of Gandhi’s lieutenants if he seriously believed that six months’ universal turning of the wheel would bring swarāj, self-government. The reply was, “I do not believe in anything more than I believe in that”; to which Tagore answered, with a touch of contempt, that if he were assured that by worshipping the feet of a pāndā---the proprietary priest of a shrine, or a temple tout: not an esteemed profession---he could enter Heaven, he might conceivably regard the worshipping as a trifle but could have no use for a Heaven obtained in that mechanical fashion.

Long before this, long before Gandhi’s name had been heard even in India, Tagore had stressed this necessity for spiritual emancipation. If this came, it would be like the Kingdom of Heaven, to which everything else would be added. He wrote to a friend, in 1893; “Till we can justify ourselves we should hide ourselves.” In his Introduction to his friend Willie Pearson’s Shantiniketan, he said:---

I seemed choked for breath in the hideous nightmare of our present time, meaningless in its petty ambitions of poverty, and felt in me the struggle of my motherland for awakening in spiritual emancipation. Our endeavours after political emancipation seemed to me unreal to the core, and pitifully feeble in their utter helplessness. I felt that it is a blessing of Providence that begging should be an unprofitable profession, and that only to him that hath shall be given. I said to myself that we must seek for our own inheritance, and with it buy our true place in the world.

It was with this aim that Tagore founded his now world-famous school at Santiniketan, as the nineteenth century was ending. He sought to create not merely a school but a centre where all India might find spiritual autonomy. We may say that his prayer for India was his prayer for himself: “I am praying to be lighted from within, and not simply to hold a light in my hand.”⁵ Or again: “It is a moral duty for every race to cultivate strength, so as to be able to help the world’s balance of power to remain even. We are doing England the greatest disservice possible by making it easy for her to despise us and yet to rule; to feel very little sympathy forus and yet to judge us.”⁶ Weakness, he maintained, was sinful, “because it is a menace to the strong and the surest cause of downfall for others than those who own it.”

Tagore, as you know, was born a member of the Brahmo Samaj. He belonged to the Hindu civilization, but he was very little of a Hindu in belief and practice. In his later years his thought more and more became what it is usual to style “Left.” The poverty and wretchedness of India oppressed him increasingly. He cherished no illusions about the flaws of the Soviet system, but its educational effort, its work for the peasant, filled him with delight and admiration. “I do not believe that the punitive rod is inactive in the present Russian regime,” he wrote in 1933, “but at the same time education expands with extraordinary vigour.” In what was to be his last public address, on his eightieth birthday, May 6, 1941, he paid tribute to “the unstinted energy with which Soviet Russia was trying to fight disease and illiteracy . . . steadily liquidating ignorance and poverty and abject humiliation from the face of a vast continent,” and to Russia’s abolition of class distinctions. This humanitarian strain became so much Tagore’s permanent thought that he changed into something very unlike the dreamy mystic the outside world believed him to be. When I was last in India, in October, 1939, he said, and only partly in jest, that he hoped to live to see a Russian conquest of his country, since the Soviet system was the only one in the world which would drop a bomb indiscriminatingly and equally on those two symbolically contiguous shrines, the Islamic mosque, and the renowned Hindu temple of Juggernaut, at Puri. Two years earlier he had told an English visitor that he would welcome even a phase of Atheism in India, as it would burn up in its devastating fire a continent of harmful rubbish that passed as religion.

All this interested me deeply, because my own first political or semi-political memories go back to a time when the West accepted, as one of the universe’s eternal truths, what was styled the “spirituality” of the Russian peasant. Nothing, we were assured, would ever persuade him to give up his icons, his religious rites and genuflexions at places of pilgrimage. I have lived to see Russia officially pass to an extreme of Secularism, and have often predicted that the same would happen in “spiritual” India in my own lifetime if I lived out the allotted span of three-score years and ten. I have not seen it yet, but there are those present this morning who will surely see it. When it happens, one of the influences which will have done most to bring it about will be the life and teaching of this poet who to the outside world is the poet of the gracious lyrics and meditations of Gitanjali.

I wonder if, in the brief and altogether inadequate time at our disposal, I have at all managed to bring out the essential differences between these two great personalities, Gandhi and Tagore, and their impact, in each case a tremendous one, on the whole texture of the thought of close on four hundred million people. Both desired to see India free; both desired to see in India an essentially peasant civilization, simple in its wants and system; but Tagore believed in the material achievement of the West and in the necessity of its application in India, to do away with preventible disease, malnutrition, poverty, drudgery, ignorance. I doubt if such a feature of Soviet Russia as the Dnieperpetrovsk dam would have appealed to Gandhi. It certainly appealed to Tagore. Further, while Gandhi is a strong and in some ways an orthodox Hindu, Tagore longed to see a complete synthesis of the best of both East and West; he would accept with both hands whatever he thought good and wise, from whatever source it came. The clash in their attitude found a focus on an outstanding Indian personality, when Gandhi in 1921 spoke disparagingly of Rammohan Roy, calling him a pigmy in comparison with Kabir and Nanak, two religious teachers of the days before the West influenced India. Tagore seized on the fact that these two saints “in their life and teaching made organic union of the Hindu and Muhammadan cultures---and such realization of the spiritual unity through all differences of appearance is truly Indian.”⁷ He picked up the challenge in Gandhi’s use of that word “pigmy,” and replied:---

In the time of Rammohan Roy the West had come to the East with a shock that caused panic in the heart of India. The natural cry was for exclusion. But this was the cry of fear, the cry of weakness, the cry of the dwarf. Through the great mind of Rammohan Roy the true spirit of India asserted itself and accepted the West, not by the rejection of the soul of India, but by the comprehension of the soul of the West.

Rammohan Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, only because his education had been perfectly Eastern---he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a schoolboy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be a friend of the West.” In the background of Tagore’s thought was always this faith and hope, that East and West were intended in God’s purposes to help and complete each other. “ The mantram⁸ which gives our spiritual vision its right of entrance into the soul of all things is the mantram of India, the mantram of Peace, of Goodness, of Unity---Sāntam, Sivam, Advaitam. The distracted mind of the West is knocking at the gate of India for this. And is it to be met there with a hoarse shout of exclusion?”⁹ If Rammohan Roy was not understood by modern India, this only showed “that the pure light of her own truth had been obscured for the moment by the storm-clouds of passion.”

Tagore’s last twenty years were very largely a series of prolonged tours which took him all over the world---to Persia and Russia and Japan, as well as Europe and America. Like Byron, who took “the English spirit on pilgrimage through Europe,” he carried the Indian spirit on pilgrimage through the civilized lands. He brought also the spirit of the West in pilgrimage back to India. In two of his main lines of conviction he was many years in advance of most of his Western contemporaries. In a wise little book, Nationalism, published during the First World War, in 1916, he stressed the ruin implicit for all peoples in the modern excessive cult of the nation, as a force integrated and organized, far too often and readily and deliberately, for aggression and rapine. He always carefully distinguished the nation from the people, as in his distinction between the English nation and English people. The English people India had “felt as we feel the sun,” whereas the nation had been a clogging and blinding mist.

He saw also, very clearly and very early, the peril of the machine. In a striking drama produced first in 1922, Muktadhārā (The Free Current)¹⁰ he shows a dam built against a stream---sinister on the sunset’s majestic background, crouching over the land and its life, overtopping even God’s shrine. A boy who is foster-son of the chained river breaks his mother’s fetters, and his lifeless body is borne tenderly away by the released waves. For all his admiration for the West’s mechanical achievement, Tagore hated the way the machine had made of men and women mere implements and had ravaged and shattered the world’s physical loveliness, and this warning he never ceased to utter.

I am not attempting to do more than indicate a few of the leading ideas which have governed the lives of exceptionally gifted and influential Indians of our day. I have been dealing with Indians who belonged by inheritance to the Hindu tradition, because I have known them most intimately, and because Hinduism is of the essence of India and has not spread beyond its borders except with Hindu emigration to the islands of the East Indies and, later, to the West Indies, South America, and South Africa. Islam, as you know, is a religion which is supernational, has spread all over Asia and Africa, and exists in south-eastern Europe. Islam in India, moreover, in its political action has rarely even temporarily become solely, or even mainly, Indian; it has remained primarily religious even when acting politically.

Yet it must not be supposed that Islam in India has been static or unvisited by the problems and disquiets of the modern world.

“The most remarkable phenomenon of modern history,” wrote Sir Muhammad Iqbal, “is the enormous rapidity with which the world of Islam is spiritually moving towards the West. . . . During all the centuries of our intellectual stupor Europe has been seriously thinking on the great problems in which the philosophers and scientists of Islam were so keenly interested. Since the Middle Ages, when the schools of Muslim theology were completed, infinite advance has taken place in the domain of human thought and experience. . . . It seems as if the intellect of man is outgrowing its own most fundamental categories---time, space, and causality.”¹¹

Iqbal was a poet, recognized as outstanding in both Persian and Urdu. He was also a man of exceptional powers as a philosopher. By race a Kashmiri Brahman, a clansman of such famous leaders of Hindu India as Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, his mind inherited to the full the subtlety and speculative daring of the great Forest Sages of Antiquity. James Russell Lowell called the dramatist Calderon an “Arab soul in Spanish feathers.” Iqbal was the soul of a rishi in Islamic plumage; a loyal Muslim, but one who maintained that his religion not merely permitted but enjoined full freedom of speculation. He was greatly exercised by problems which have exercised modern Western philosophers, those of time and space, and especially by the problem of time. He particularly refers to a Muslim tradition that the Prophet on one occasion identified Allah with Dahr (Time), and cites the statement of the Quran that the alternation of day and night is one of the greatest signs of the Almighty.

Iqbal, however, was politician as well as poet, theologian, and philosopher. Doubtless there have been happy periods of human existence when a thinking man might ignore politics; but we who have lived through the present century, as I observed at the outset, have not known such. Politics have become the very condition of our mere survival; and in India they have meant everything to many, and something to almost all, educated men and women.

Iqbal lived in the Punjab, which has for India a comparatively high standard of living, certainly far higher than the standard in Bengal. Yet he too, as well as Tagore, was troubled by India’s misery. In a letter written to me when he knew he was a dying man, he wrote despairingly of his wretchedness at “the chaos I foresee as coming upon my vast undisciplined and starving country.” And, like Tagore, he wanted India, Islamic no less than Hindu India, to move into the modern world and to effect for herself, not an escape, but a synthesis of the West with the East. He writes of “the assimilative spirit of Islam” and “the dynamic outlook of the Quran.” He quotes with approval the observation of Hobbes, that “to have a succession of identical thoughts and feelings is to have no thoughts and feelings at all.” Partly because Islam in India originally came with invaders from Western and especially Central Asia, and because the Punjab is very close in climate and spirit, as well as geographically, to the extra-Indian regions of Central Asia, Iqbal looked towards Turkey as a model of what can be done in fashioning ancient civilizations anew. Most Muslim countries, he said, were “mechanically repeating old values, whereas the Turk is on the way to creating new values.” Yet in him we find always, as we find in Gandhi (but not in Tagore or Jawaharlal Nehru), a watchful and cautious conservatism, sometimes almost a fearfulness of the changes he saw as inevitable and also as desirable. The appearance of liberal ideas in Islam constituted the most critical moment “ in its history. “Liberalism has a tendency to act as a force of disintegration, and the race-idea which appears to be working in modern Islam with greater force than ever may ultimately wipe off the broad human outlook which Muslim people have imbibed from their religion.”¹² As these words indicate, Iqbal saw, as clearly as Tagore, the danger in our modern cult of the nation, though his perception of this danger conflicted with his intense admiration of Turkey, the newest of the world’s nationalist States. But, as Tagore also well knew, it is not easy, nor is it necessary in our complex days, to be consistent to the point of refusing to admit a partial exception to our argument. So, though Iqbal distrusted and disliked the nationalism which has postponed the unity, amid uniqueness and individuality, of the races of mankind, yet he urged Muslim peoples everywhere to follow the example of Turkey in shaking off “dogmatic slumber. . . . She alone has claimed her right of intellectual freedom; she alone,” he says, reminding us of his Brahmanic blood and inheritance by reversing a famous prayer of the Upanishads, “has passed from the ideal to the real---a transition which entails keen intellectual and moral struggle.”¹³ The Quran “cannot be inimical to the idea of evolution,” and neither in the Holy Book nor in authoritative Islamic teaching and tradition was there “anything to justify the present attitude.”¹⁴ “Equipped with penetrative thought and fresh experience the world of Islam should courageously proceed to the work of reconstruction.” Iqbal died too soon to be able to do more than set out principles and postulates, and perhaps he did not foresee all the possible problems and changes which time might bring---time and Turkey’s example, for Turkey, in whose awakening he hailed at last what a French writer had termed “the element of stability in the world of Islam,” has now moved like Soviet Russia into Secularism. Yet I believe he would have bravely faced even these perils and changes, for in words which to me recall the Buddha’s insistence that “in all we do mind must be the master “ Iqbal asserted that “it is the invisible mental background” of an act “which ultimately determines its character.”

No survey, however sketchy, can close without a word about Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. By race, like Iqbal, a Kashmiri Brahman, he has thrown away his aristocracy of birth with as complete an abnegation as the Buddha himself. It is the evil times in which we live that have made him a politician; until he was in his twenties no one would have dreamed for him even the beginnings of the stormy career which has included immense tracts of life wasted in imprisonment. His deepest interests, if our times had not changed them, would have been in literature. His handling of our difficult and intricate language is masterly, not merely in formal accuracy, though it is that---I can recall only once in his many writings a slip in idiom---but in the nervous and imaginative quality he brings to his sentences. He is one of the very few people in India who not only read an occasional good book, but buy such books, and he buys them steadily. You will find on his shelves our latest European authors, and, above all, our poets. Few Englishmen know our poetry, from Shakespeare to the youngest of our admired living poets, as he does.

He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge; he still keeps on his walls a photograph of himself in O.T.C. uniform at Harrow. It is a jest, and a little more than a jest, with his colleagues, that his thought is more English than Indian. “Talk that over with Jawaharlal,” Gandhi has sometimes said to me. “He has a mind like yours, he thinks like your people.” When I entered a session of the Congress Working Committee, in October, 1939, I saluted them Indian-fashion. Rajagopalachari,who was then Premier of Madras, happened to be the nearest to me, and had made the English gesture of holding out his hand. As he noted my action, he apologized, with a glance towards Jawaharlal, adding, “It is his Anglo-Saxonism that gets us into these bad ways.” I have heard suggestions by Nehru countered by other members of the Working Committee with the remark, “That’s your Anglo-Saxon mind!”

What was it that made this man choose a course so alien to his nature and upbringing? There can be no question that it was the sight of India’s physical misery and poverty. These have so oppressed his mind that he will never cease from being politician until life itself closes. There are lines of Whittier, about Charles Sumner, which came to me like a trumpet call when I was young, as they have come to others; and when I recall them to-day I always think of Jawaharlal Nehru:---

“Forgo thy dreams of lettered ease:
Put thou the scholar’s promise by.
The rights of man are more than these!”
He heard, and answered, “Here am I!”

He set his face against the blast.
His feet against the flinty shard;
Till the hard service grew at last
Its own exceeding great reward.

That is what has happened to Nehru. The hard service, the dreary years, have become their own exceeding great reward, for he sees them as insignificant against the sorrows of countless humbler folk. When he returned to India after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, an event which profoundly affected him, he had long been feeling wretched and unsure of his place as President of the National Congress, and wished to resign. The 1937 elections were drawing on. Nehru, instead of withdrawing to some solitude, plunged into India’s existence.

For many months I wandered about India and millions of faces passed before my eyes. I saw a thousand facets of this country of mine in all their rich diversity, and yet always with the unifying impress of India upon them. I sought to understand what lay behind those millions of eyes that stared at me, what hopes and desires, what untold sorrow and misery unexpressed. Glimpses came to me that illumined my vision and made me realize the immensity of the problems of the hundreds of millions of our people.¹⁵

I have spoken of his Anglo-Saxonism, of his debt to our English civilization. It would be a mistake to overstress this, however, and to make him out to be, as official circles have often thought him, an Englishman who has gone wrong, perhaps because of tactless treatment. He is not so English as all that. He is a man of what is already revealing itself as the Age of To-morrow. If the last century and a half has been the Nationalist Age, this New Age will be International and not National in character. A second charge often brought against Nehru is that he is not a Nationalist but an Internationalist. This charge is true. He lives for India, but he lives also for the depressed sections of every land. This fact has long been recognized outside India; his name has lit a fire of hope from Moscow to Hollywood, and you cannot be long in his company without receiving proof of this.

He is a Socialist, and one who means his Socialism. He is not a Marxist, though the Marxist philosophy, and above all its insistence that philosophy must concern itself with material conditions and express itself in action, have greatly influenced him. He is not a worshipper of the Soviet system; like Tagore, he has been repelled by the purges and suppressions. But, like Tagore, he has been impressed by the fact that the Soviet system is the first system of government which makes as its professed aim government by the working classes, and that it has striven to bring education to those classes.

No orthodoxy, however, whether economic or nationalist or religious, appeals to him. He is incurably an individualist. He criticizes his own side as frankly as he criticizes opponents. There is no charge which its enemies bring against Congress which you will not find first stated, and with a downright vigour, in Nehru’s own writings. They are a wonderful quarry for those who cannot find stones for themselves and yet passionately desire to have stones to throw. Unlike other frank speakers, he seems to be without surprise or resentment when he is himself criticized frankly. He has his faults, and is aware of them. He is apt to be doctrinaire, and in his passion for logical and formal finish and completeness he sometimes overpolishes a statement until it becomes unfair. As he once admitted to me: “When I am on a platform or have a pen in my hand I am apt to say too much.” Nevertheless, his habit and discipline is carefulness of statement, and if you can show him that he has been unfair or inaccurate he does not hedge or defend the slip, he withdraws it. No man ever gushed less or indulged less in the practice of offering bouquets. He desires none himself, and he has few for others. Because of the decision and force with which he expresses himself, he has been misunderstood in England as few men have been, and is believed to be a bigot and irreconcilable. The belief is utterly mistaken.

He differs from the men I have mentioned---from Gandhi by his wide internationalism, his radicalism, his modernism, and from them all by the complete absence from his writings and speeches of religion. I remember how this fact disturbed a member of the Indian Government, who found it hard to believe that a man devoid of religious confession could be a good man. It has been said of the Buddha that no man ever lived more godless yet more godlike. No man ever lived more ethical than Jawaharlal Nehru, though he lives without religious creed.

He sums up in himself, despite his want of religious faith, the strains of thought which have been pulsing strongly in India’s noblest men for a hundred years past. He is not a believer in Non-Violence in the way that Gandhi is. In a way he has been an Indian Nevinson, making his path to wherever danger is greatest. He was in Barcelona during the fiercest of the Spanish fighting, and spent some time in the front line. He was in Prague all through the Sudeten crisis. When I last met him, in India, two years ago, he had just spent a month in Chungking as the guest of the Chinese Government, bombed several times daily. He remarked: “I think I can claim to know more about being bombed than anyone else in India, British or Indian.”

But so far as India’s struggle is concerned Nehru believes deeply in Non-Violence. He believes in it, although his experiences in Spain and Czechoslovakia---in the latter country, especially, some of our British pacifists played a very dubious part, and Nehru, watching them at close quarters, commented on this at the time---have entered into a revealing passage I now quote:---

Some Socialists and Marxists, thinking in terms of Europe and its pacifists, tried to ridicule the method of non-violence. I am no admirer of European pacifists, and crisis after crisis has shown them to be not only totally ineffective but often the unconscious tools of reaction and even war-mongering. Theirs has been the negative passive attitude which surrenders to evil and violence because resistance would lead to a breach of their pacifist doctrine. Political surrender leads almost inevitably to moral surrender also.

But the non-violence of the Congress was the very opposite of this and the basis of it was no surrender, political or moral, to what it considered evil. It involves, as all policies do, the acceptance of compromises when circumstances dictate them, but essentially perhaps it is more uncompromising than other policies. It is dynamic and not passive; it is not non-resistance but resistance to wrong doing, though that resistance is peaceful. In practice it had proved remarkably successful not only in achieving visible results but also in the far more important task of strengthening the morale of the nation and training the people for peaceful disciplined and united action.¹⁶

Intensely individual, Nehru is yet the leader whose character and mission fulfil what Rammohan Roy, the first Indian to confront the West with appraising eyes, began. His friendship with both Tagore and Gandhi has been close and unbroken. Not even Gandhi more passionately desires to see in India a new type of civilization---new, that is, unless we admit that in some sense Russia, despite her intensive industrialization, has anticipated it---a civilization essentially peasant and agrarian in kind. Not even Iqbal was more conscious of the tremendous challenge of changing, and exceedingly swiftly changing, times. Not even Tagore’ was more conscious of the immense achievement of Europe and America, or was more abreast of the latest and most vivid thinking of our age. It has been my good fortune to have friendship with all these men, and by any standards known to me, of any age or land, they were all great men. And great men are never common. If the test of national achievement is to have produced greatness of mind and character, then India in our time has become a nation.

If I were attempting to make any sort of just survey of what India has attained in this kind of achievement in our time, I should mention many others. Thanks to such men as the four I have chosen, leaders yet typical of very many who are less well known outside India---thanks to such men and their predecessors, to Gokhale and Ansari no less than to Gandhi and Tagore and Iqbal---the Indian political movement of our day has been something new in Nationalist struggles. When the Minute Men faced the British redcoats at Lexington, both sides were conscious of the conflict of two national entities; it was America, a nation risen almost within a decade or so, which confronted Britain. But when a Jawaharlal Nehru confronts the magistrate who is to send him to imprisonment again, the prisoner is thinking of a far wider conflict than the one visualized in any thought of India and England. He remembers, as Tagore remembered always, the dark faces of Africa’s submerged tribes; he remembers also, and equally, the men he saw enduring cold and physical pain on the banks of the Ebro, the Czechs who knew well what slaughter and tyranny the future held for them, the Chinese coolies whom the Japanese warships broke on Shanghai streets, and the patient, almost despairing unemployed of Britain’s Rhondda, of our Tyneside and Clydeside. On the last page of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is an outburst you all doubtless remember:---

India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only, peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!

But that is not the dream of these men at all! That dream died for ever---with how much else!---on the beaches of Dunkirk and at Andaelsnes and in Crete. It died in these men long before Dunkirk, long before even Munich. It may be historically true that Gandhi’s doctrine of Non-Violence came to him first out of his grim experience of poverty and helplessness when faced by the mechanical might of modern Europe and the fierce ruthless vigour of the white races---that it was born as he watched the Zulus whose sores and wounds he tended, and as he lay sleepless in a South African train which was taking him from one humiliation to another. But the ideas which have changed the thought of whole peoples have usually been born thus, not in a palace or chancellery but in a stable or the ward of a hospital or the cell of a prison. And about an ethical idea there is something so mastering and imperious, that unless you are prepared to have your whole life and outlook revolutionized you had better not even look at it. For these ideas have a habit of ending by claiming all. They are like that King of whom you were warned, you remember, that if you passed his threshold then

the King
Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep.

In the world we knew only yesterday, of Great Powers and the balance of power among them, of navies and panzer divisions and air fleets, India, with her millenniums of meditation and military insignificance, her variety and discrepancy of race and creed, might well seem the grotesque newcomer of Forster’s words. But, partly because of these internal problems, partly because of her depressed classes and warring religions, India’s leaders have been driven in on themselves and also have been able to give their whole minds to the study of the things that made severance between man and man, the whole world over. Out of their country’s weakness, as the clouds gathered above the stronger nations, of two world wars in one generation, their thought has been more than national; they have become aware of that deeper conflict, between those who were trodden down and those who possessed the power and the glory. In much the same fashion the man who made Christianity a world religion and not a Judaean and Galilean sect found his own truth. It was out of defeat, unmitigated and overwhelming, that Russia, the land of countless peasant revolts and their suppression in blood, first dreamed of her Workers’ State. It is out of the perils and sorrows of our own time that a vision of a new Commonwealth of All Peoples is coming to the rich and powerful nations of the British Empire and the United States. Nehru has said that he would like to keep still “the silken bonds of the spirit between Britain and India.” Those silken bonds have been woven already; and because in their spinning both Indians and British have been co-workers with God, I believe his wish will be fulfilled. Ruskin and Tolstoi and Gandhi---these names stand for no narrow nationalist philosophy. We are debtors both to Greeks and barbarians, to Indians and British alike; and in our own day, a day of storm and perplexity such as hardly any day has known, there has sprung to fruition the tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

Appendix

The Conway Memorial Lectureship

At a general meeting of the South Place Ethical Society, held on October 22, 1908, it was resolved that an effort should be made to establish a series of lectures, to be printed and widely circulated, as a permanent Memorial to Dr. Moncure Conway. The general objective in view was the furtherance of the cause of social, political, and religious freedom always closely associated with his name.

The range of the lectures (of which the thirty-third is published herewith) must be regulated by the financial support accorded to the scheme. It is thus most desirable that the Lecture Committee should be able to count upon such support. Those who enjoy the liberty for which Conway so nobly fought should be eager to keep his name alive as a reminder to the future of what was so hardly won. An earnest appeal is therefore made for donations and subscriptions. Contributions may be forwarded to the Hon. Treasurer.

• Ernest Carr, Hon. Secretary.
• C. E. Lister, Hon. Treasurer,
• Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, W.C.1.

⁎  ⁎  ⁎

South Place Ethical Society,
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, W.C.1.

Objects of the Society:---

“The objects of the Society are the study and dissemination of ethical principles and the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment.”