BY DR. P. GUHA-THAKURTA, M.A., Ph.D.

I could not help feeling rather depressed the moment I noticed it announced in a Bombay newspaper about the last week of January that Mr. Edward Thompson, lecturer in Bengali at Oxford, had come on a visit to India on a mission of Indian culture. For, I felt that my friend, Mr. Thompson, had chosen a most inopportune moment for his mission. India is passing through a crisis in her relations with Britain, political as well as intellectual. This can be regarded, as hardly a suitable occasion for even such a fair-minded and sincere intellectual friend of India as Mr. Thompson to undertake, and far less to succeed in, an effort to promote cultural co-operation between English and Indian literature. I wrote him a letter telling him all my misgivings. Although in reply he did not admit in so many words that he also felt just as I did, his letter was none too cheerful. Then he was good enough to pay me a visit when he came to Delhi. I referred to the point again. From all that he said during nearly two hours he was with me, I could easily gather that he was disappointed with the poor response he had received from the intellectual centres he had so far visited. He told me with genuine regret that he had decided to cut short his originally planned period of stay in India. That Mr. Thompson went back to England a much sadder man than when he came here, was obvious from the interview he gave to a press representative on the eve of his departure from Calcutta. But I wished that he had told us something about his impressions of the Indian Renaissance movement, instead of giving his views on the defects of the Gandhi-Irwin pact or Mahatma Gandhi's mistakes at the Round Table Conference. Did he or did he not, in the course of his brief stay in this country, discover any possibilities of establishing new intellectual contact between India and the West? I understood that he had undertaken the tour purely on his own initiative, possibly with a view to making a report to the Rhodes Trustees if any such intellectual co-operation was feasible. Did Mr. Thompson come across any modern Indian writer of outstanding qualities in any of the half-a dozen active and efflorescent Indian vernaculars who, in his opinion at least, should receive recognition in the West? This is the question that Mr. Thompson ought to have dealt with to our satisfaction as well as his own, before he left India.

I believe that, in spite of all sorts of political and racial antipathies and antagonisms now so rampant, there is still in India a considerable number of people who are keenly anxious to bridge the gulf between England and India by a mutual exchange of each other's intellectual and cultural achievements. Mr. Thompson must have found in such literary periodicals as the Visva-Bharati Quarterly, the Orient and the Triveni clear manifestations of precisely the same objects and ideals as he had at heart. These magazines, among several others, have been consistently endeavouring to encourage the vernaculars by publishing, from time to time, English translations of various forms of literary compositions of writers in the original vernaculars, and thereby promoting the cause of intellectual co-operation between India and England in a very practical manner. I do not know how far it was possible for Mr. Thompson, while visiting the different intellectual centres, to get into touch with the real cultural leaders of the Indian Renaissance, and especially, with the younger schools of promising poets, novelists, playwrights or critical essayists in the different vernaculars. In any case, this was the only channel through which Mr. Thompson could have touched the roots of modern Indian culture and intellectual activity.

I will never doubt Mr. Thompson's fitness for the mission with which he came. For, he is no stranger to intellectual circles in India. His works on the life and writings of Tagore have considerably added to the knowledge and proper appreciation of the Poet among English-speaking nations. He himself has written several novels, depicting contemporary Indian life and its problems. All this certainly bears testimony to his abiding love and admiration for Indian culture. Mr. Thompson is a poet of no mean order, and consequently, his intellectual affiliations with the characteristically lyric flowering in Indian literature are but natural. I do not think his acquaintance with other creative Indian vernaculars is as intimate and thorough as with Bengali. Nevertheless, I know him to possess a full and capacious mind which ought to have enabled him, even through the medium of English, to recognise the possibilities of the other modern Indian vernaculars with which he might not be as deeply conversant as Bengali. But I have a slight fear that Mr. Thompson's mind, although inclined much more India-ward than that of the average intelligent Britisher, is not quite free from political bias. He will himself recognise, however, that the lack of recognition of India's political equality by Great Britain has so far been the greatest stumbling-block to co-operation as co-equals in the intellectual sphere. To this, of course, must be added a certain spirit of cynical indifference, born of ignorance, and often, a very decided prejudice, among a certain class of Britishers in India, against her intellectual attainments in the past as well as in modern times. This is most tragic, especially when one remembers that modern India had welcomed English literature and arts with an ardour, perhaps unparalleled in any other land touched by Western civilisation. It should, therefore, have been a part of Mr. Thompson's mission of Indian culture to attempt to clear the misconceptions and prejudices of the Britishers in India regarding India's culture and literature. A mission such as Mr. Thompson had in mind, will never succeed with a mere veneer of affection and respect for Indian culture.

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