India and the West
THIS book was written principally to interpret India to America, but it should be read by everyone who is anxious to learn what India is thinking today. As Louis Bromfield says, the author has pre- sented India through the eyes of an Indian but in the idiom of an American, and so the people in it, their background, their customs and their traditions, become human and real.
Dr. Krishnalal Shridharani is a Hindu of the same caste as Mahatma Gandhi. He was born in a little Gujarat village in 1911, and he describes intimately his home life, his boyhood, his school- mates and his parents. A more attractive picture of life in a middle- class Hindu family would be hard to find. After leaving school; he went to Gandhi's ashram at Ahmedabad, where, like a number of students, he was put in prison for taking part in the civil dis- obedience movement. But the ordeal was not very severe ; the prisoners were sent up to Nasik for the hot weather, and he spent some of his time in writing a love-poem for his English warder! After his release he attended classes at Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's famous academy, and then took ship to America in order to complete his education at Columbia University. We need scarcely be surprised at the distorted ideas that Americans have about India when we read of the queer assortment of Indians whom Dr. Shri- dharani came across there. Most of them were charlatans, like Swami Sulaiman, with his twenty-five dollar courses in Yogic Breathing, or Princess Sobrawallah, with her secret recipe for cooking Bombay duck. At his first dinner party, Dr. Shridharani was puzzled to find a coil of rope lying on the drawing-room floor ; but the mystery was solved when his hostess solemnly announced, " And now our distinguished guest from India, that land of mystery, will perform the rope-trick." India is always to the man in the street a land of mystery ; even hair tonics are advertised as made in India.
Dr. Shridharani devotes much of his book to a comparison between oriental and occidental culture, and his remarks upon the difference between Indian and European music and painting are particularly illuminating. The old masters in India, he -says, hardly ever painted from models, seeing little beauty in western painters' painstakingly accurate and photographic compositions. The Hindu artist illuminates reality through metaphysical flights. So, too, he defends what some western thinkers have called the negative quality of Hindu reasoning. The Hindu philosopher does not display the arrogance of creating God in man's image, yet he does not dismiss- the unknown as unreal. Both western and eastern minds are engaged in tracking down reality ; but the former is intent on the physical, and the latter on the metaphysical.
As regards politics, the author is naturally an ardent Hindu nationalist. His heroes are Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, of all of whom he gives striking pen-portraits. He is a firm believer in the philosophy of non-violence, of which he furnishes an interesting exposition. His views on the political situa- tion are particularly worth studying, though he does not realise the lively fears felt by the Mahommedans that their national religion and culture is in danger of being swamped under a Hindu regime ; it is a great pity that American readers see India almost exclusively through Hindu eyes. He willingly admits that there are good Indian States, such as Mysore, Travancore and Baroda, though he is rightly severe upon the Indian princes who squander their subjects' money on extravagant visits to Europe. He emphasises the fact that' India has no quarrel with the English people ; her fight is with exploiters, native or foreign. " Indians, at home and abroad, want to fight for democracy, but to fight as free men, as equal allies of the Anglo- American Powers."
It is an ungrateful task to point out faults in this attractive work, but occasionally the author allows his sense of the picturesque to run away with him. I cannot believe that when an Indian went to a mission hospital the missionaries refused to get out the iodine until he was baptised, or that during the retreat from Burma separate roads were reserved for those wearing trousers. Nor is it true to say that the Gaikwar of Baroda nearly lost his throne for " not bowing low enough to the King," or that during the riots of 1930 scores of Hindu women fell as "soft jonquil targets " to British bullets. Nor did the judge, when sentencing Nehru, shout or
Previous page
