MEN AND LETTERS IN BENGAL.*
SELF-RBYELITION, whether in solitary men or in nations, is usually infinitely more illuminating than studies from without,
except in the rare cases where the interpreter is a man of genius and can, in the French phrase, "put himself in the skin" of the people he is studying. That conspicuous Bengali, Mr. Surendra. Nath Bannerjea, has recently thrown some suggestive light on the Bengali character and temperament. In the Times of April 5th we read an account of an interesting address on British administration in India by Professor Wegener, who accompanied the Crown Prince of Germany to Calcutta. The following passage was quoted from Professor Wegener's text :—
" In 1906 I had a very interesting oonversation with the well- known champion of Swedeshi and of Bengali nationalism, Balm. Surendra Nath Bannerjea, who could not disguise from we his astonishment that it should be possible for those ignorant and stupid Englishmen to rule over India."
Poasiby Mr. Bannerjea merely intended a gracef ul compliment to his Teutonic friend—a tactful suggestion that perhaps Prussian rule might suit Bengal better than clumsy British methods of administration. But as the Times puts it, in the cold isolation of print, Mr. Bannerjea's characteristic remark was bound to evoke the smiles of his many English friends. Mr. Bannerjea is justly proud of the fact that he once won a high place in the open competition for the Civil Service of India, and such a just pride is not logically consistent with a downright depreciation of the men who were his competitors and brother officers. In the Times of May 17th Mr. Bannerjea is at the
pains to explain that Dr. Wegener misunderstood him. All that he meant to say was that "many Englishmen who are entrusted with responsible positions in India know so little about us and stand so far apart and isolated from us that, in the words of Lord Morley, ' living in Asia they are really residing in Europe. "
No doubt the accusation thus altered is more easily proved. But even if Mr. Bannerjea had stuck to his guns, and had used a little humour—and good humour—for his powder, be might have won at least a dialectical victory. Another eminent Bengali, the late Navin Chandra Sen, a poet and humorist, was fond of arguing that the victory of our race over our Latin competitors in the struggle for empire in India was duo to our placid stolidity, or, as Professor We ;ever himself states it, to our moral rather than our intellectual qualities. Such paradoxes are always agreeable subjects for conversation, especially as they seem to imply a vague intellectual superiority in southern races. And here, in the nick of time, conies Mr. Dinesh Chandra Sen's voluminous work on Bengali literature, which makes a reasoned and definite claim that in the arts of literary representation the Bengalis can held their own with Western races. It is a claim which deserves attention and sympathetic consideration.
A Hitters of latisidi Lens-wags and Literature, By Libiesh Oleandru Bon. Calcutta: Published by the University el Calcutta. Last year the University of Calcutta published in the form of a stout folio a series of lectures on the Language and Literature of Bengal, delivered to Bengali undergraduates by 'Mr. Dincsh Chandra Sen, B.A.., a book of extraordinary interest to those who would make an impartial study of the Bengali mentality and character. It is a work -which reflects the utmost credit on the candour, industry, and learning of its author, for whom the understanding reader, if he has any respect for disinterested scholarship, must feel a hearty liking. Mr. Sen has apenb many years of laborious research in unearthing forgotten MSS. of neglected insets and rhapsodists, and from the materials thus accumu- lated has compiled a systematic account of Bengali letters from their beginnings—roughly from the twelfth century A. D.— lip to 1850. He has interspersed his criticisms with transla- tions and specimens of the poetry of his native province, and it is impossible not to sympathize with his patriotic and scholarly pride in the long series of bards who have interpreted life to Bengali readers during the last six centuries. It is not for foreigners, obviously, to venture on literary criticisms of an alien literature. The merit of poetry lies in manner not less than matter, and the humblest themes may be dignified by a treatment only to be appreciated duly by readers of the original. Especially, perhaps, is this the case in a language yposseasing an elaborate system of rhymed lyrical metres, But 'a literature, if it is not merely imitative of foreign writers, is ;necessarily a record of national characteristics, of the life, the . aspirations, the customs of the people for whom and by whom it was written. The history related by Mr. Sen is of extraor- dinary interest, since it shows us, with the most unaffected and attractive veracity, what manner of man the Bengali Hindu is. It confirms—this may as well be said at once—the impressions of those Europeans who have the longest and friendliest experience of Bengal No brief analysis of Mr. Sen's book could give the oulmi- native effect which slowly grows upon its readers as they turn its thousand crowded pages. The whole atmosphere belongs to a world other than ours, a world of tropical sunshine, of 'exuberant vegetation, of overmastering natural forces, where gods and demons still move amidst prosaic mortals, a land of 'marvel and magic, of unchecked imaginativeness and (the sword need imply no offence) of haunting superstitions. Like the other vernacular literatures of modern India, that of Bengal is charged with religious emotionalism. Its phraseology its the phraseology of Brahmin priests, its guiding spirit is an .amalgam of animism, polytheism, pantheism, the creed of a race more credulous than the Athenians of St. Paul's time.
Mr. Sen rightly claims for Bengali literature that it is above .all a Hindu literature in inspiration, treatment, and vocabu- fary. It needs no hypercriticism to see the intimate, the characteristic workings of the Bengali mind in the picture he incidentally draws of the gradual evolution of Hinduism in Bengal. In the earliest surviving specimens of Bengali literature we see a people given up to the Tantric degradations of Buddhism. The haughtily stern morality of the aristo- cratic founders of the Buddhist faith, when transplanted to the enervating climate of Bengal, degenerated into popular licentiousness. Persecution and the immigration from the west of Brahmins and other high-caste Hindus into the Delta led to a nominal abandonment of Tantric beliefs and practices 'by the common people. But the old licence and many of the old superstitions survived, to be reflected in a literature Bur- ,prisingly erotic in expression. It is true that higher and nobler spirits in Bengal were driven to explain the highly .amatory poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by onystical and spiritual interpretations. We are assured that the Brahmin poet, Mukunda Rain (some of whose verses had the honour of being translated by E. B. Cowell), had only
platonic affection for the washerwoman, his passion for +whom he treated as an emblem of enthusiastic devotion to the Deity. This,' we are told, is a proof of the innate spirituality of the Oriental mind, which can turn even sensual abandcnment into allegories of religious rapture. The thing de, of course, not without exemplars in Western religions, but In Bengali literature it abounded with the luxuriance of tropical jungle-growths, till European teaching introduced a saner and more wholesome literary taste. Eien the .reforms .of Chaitanya and his companions, as moralizing in intention as those of his contemporary Luther, led to the appearanoe of Visnuvite sects whose tenets involved the -promisertious
association of men and women, the "Nera.Neris " of common parlance, significant survivals of the ancient abuses of Buddhist monastic life.
To the credit of Bengali intelligence it must be admitted that Carey, Marshman, and the ether early English mission- aries produced a marled and lasting effect on the Bengali language, literature, religion, and manners. From them Bengalis learned to write a vigorous, animated, and supple prose style, probably the richest and most expressive in modern India. At one time it seemed as if educated Bengal was destined to become Christian. There were many dis- tinguished converts, some of whom oven took holy orders and were eloquent preachers of Christianity. But, even then, • environment and tradition were too strong for the imported faith. Perhaps the most original and intellectually gifted of the converts was the pea Michael Menu Smitten Datta,, whose unhappy and tragic career furnishes one of the saddest episodes in Indian literary history. His copious output of epics and drama is all frankly Hindu ; his subject-matter is entirely taken from ancient Hindu legends. But the final blow to the evangelization of the Bengali upper classes was dealt by one of the most intelligent and (if the epithet is not too harsh) astute of modern Bengalis, the great Raja Ram Mohan Roy. He was a learned scholar and a shrewd man of affairs. His intensely logical mind could see that no defence was possible of the animistic polytheism of the lower classes. He fell back upon the Vedantic pantheism of his Sanskrit reading, and this, he managed to convince himself and others, was a pure and lofty "unitarianism."
Hence the Brahtno Somaj, which has effectually taken the place once occupied, if only for a time, by Christianity. Hence in religion and the social systems which accompany it the teaching of modern Europe has resulted in a reversion to what, in name at least, is one of the earliest of the products of the Hindu mind, and Bengal remains contentedly and fundamentally Hindu. So perhaps may it be with the politi- cal reforms with which the India Office has recently endowed Bengal. Councils and other quasi-democratic institutions arise apace, but except so far as they are guided by European officials they must necessarily suffer a sea change, and in their working must sooner or later surprise their originators, Perhaps it was of the ingenuousnese of these that Mr. Baniaerjea was thinking if he was astonished " that it should be possible for these ignorant and stupid Englishmen to rule over India." If that were his meaning there is some excuse for a naively offensive statement of his case. But he would help the natural evolution of indigenous society better if he would candidly declare that Bengali nationalists only accept European reforms in order to turn them to Hindu uses, since Hinduism and all that goes with it are too deeply rooted in Bengali nature to be eradicated by Macaulay'a Essays or Mill's History of British India.
Some apology is needed for drawing these practical con- clusions from Mr. San's purely literary and scholarly labours. Perhaps the best apology is the fact that, though Mr. Sen's main concern is letters, and not life, his readers, even if they only read at random and skip freely, will learn more about modern Bengal, and, incidentally, about modern Hinduism and its origins, than from dozens of travel books. Mr. Sen's work is written by a Hindu for Hindus. It contains many delightful examples of the fantastic Oriental imagination, one of the most characteristic being the folk-tale printed at p. 596. Mr. Sen takes us straight into "'the Arabian Nights," which owed much to Indian sources for its entertaining stories. (It is even possible that Sindbad the Sailor was a Bengali explorer.) It is all very wonderful and enchanting and medieval. But • it is centuries away from the Europe of Ibsen and Wells and Anatole France and Bernard Shaw. It is all pure fantasy. Why should we expect anything else? There are some of us who can enjoy the ancient fabulists and can rejoice that their counterparts still exist. We can even admit, with Cowell, that Mukunda Ram was a Bengali Crabbe, can allow that Michael Dials was a Bengali Milton, Navin Chandra Son a Bengali Byron, and, at the risk of seeming Profanity, that Bankim was a Bengali Walter Scott. But even among the Anglo-Indians whose intelligence Mr. Banner- jea, misprizes or misunderstand,, and even in literature (which for them was an amusement and a solace in exile) we have Aberigh Mackay, whose charming humour has not been approached even by the delightful and accom- plished Harts .Prasad Shashi, and Sir Alfred Lya11, whose " Verses Written in India" strike a note still lacking in Indian poetry. The comparison is one which Mr. Sen may • justly deprecate. He is too good and too patriotic a student of, indigenous verse to wander into fields outside his com- petence and his curiosity. He is content to give a candid, simple, and convincing picture of his native literature. In its kind his bookie a masterpiece—modest, learned, thorough, and sympathetic. Perhaps no other man living has the learning and the happy industry required for the task he has successfully accomplished. He must blame Mr. Surendra. Nath Bannerjea and his like if European readers are tempted to ask whether this charmingly straightforward and enassuming narrative of Bengali literary achievement justifies the claim that the Bengali is the intellectual superior of the race which was once capable of producing a 'Spenser, a Shakespeare, a Milton, and even now retains some portion, we may hope, of its old mental, moral, and administrative capacity. We can at least still feel an. honest admiration for modest scholarship, and have still enough sense of humour to hope that Mr. Bannerjea. was poking fun at his Teutonic interlocutor.
Previous page
