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

Bernard Shaw in India! But before one had time to realise that he was here, he was gone. It was not a visit, honestly speaking, but just a visitation or perhaps only a presence as eccentric and enigmatic as his own self. Of course, Shaw did not intend that it should be otherwise; but it will be sometime before he realises that in passing India by only as a stage of halt on a wide sojourn over the globe, he has added one more legend to an already much too legendary halo that encircles his name. The legend is sure to persist in India longer than he may suspect, in spite of the earnest efforts of the pressmen of Bombay to give his movements for a week, in and out of the luxury liner lying in the harbour, a touch of reality.

The message of the ‘strong man’ he gave to India will soon be forgotten; even his advice that public speaking should be made a capital offence under Swaraj will pass out of our statesmen's memory. In fact, all the things he said about us, our garrulousness, our romantic notions of liberty, our pursuit after Dominion Status and our dispute with our British rulers, will not outlive even the time the Empress of Britain takes to go round the world. But the legend of the whimsical appearance of a man who refused to see anything in India like an ordinary tourist, will linger. Not only that; the legend will increase in mystery as people begin to ponder on the inveterate vanity of a man, who came and said that he was on show for eight days in Bombay and was welcome to a good view by anybody in India who might care to go and have a look at him. The people of this country are not used to be treated in that way by any visitor, however world-famous he may be.

But what has been an escape from the botheration of sight-seeing to Shaw is not compensated by the obvious loss to him of the opportunities of knowing intimately what we in India really think of him. We, too, have one or two candid things to say about his contributions to the literature, thought, and culture of the twentieth century. He has not attacked specifically our literary traditions or social or political institutions, and naturally, we can talk about his exploits like disinterested people whom he never gave any cause for offence. In our enjoyment of his wit, pungent or mellow, the element of self-criticism has never entered. We have watched him from a distance; we were neither shocked nor hurt by his dangerous doctrines. What appeared in the beginning to the entire British race as aspersions of an eccentric genius appeared to us only as the violent and impetuous outbursts of a young unknown Irishman who was dying to get himself talked about.

To-day in England, as Frank Harris informs as, in his posthumous biography of Bernard Shaw by quoting Oscar Wilde's epigram regarding him: "He has no enemies, but none of his friends like him." Bat in India his friends do, indeed, like and admire him tremendously. A great deal that has been said against him has not been taken seriously at all in this country; because one feeling about Shaw in India is quite pronounced; which is, that Shaw will take a lot of beating and is quite competent to defend himself without anybody's aid. India has no need either to blaspheme him or lionise him. She can size up Shaw in his proper dimensions.

In spite of his seventy-six years, he is still the Irish playboy at heart. Up to the present day, he has been the one and the same man, doing only the one and the same thing, that is, trying to change the ideas and outlook of the British people. He is just as keen today to save human society from confusion and inequality as he was to denounce Victorian ideas at the very beginning of his literary career. He smote one Victorian superstition after another; he denounced the sentimental and self-deluded Victorian type of heroine in Widower's Houses and enlarged the picture of the New Woman in the Philanderer. His iconoclasm, eventually in Man and Superman, went even deeper than a mere attack against conventional morality; it cut at the very root of the Victorian notions of sex. The doctrine of Life-Force which Shaw expounded in 1903 has, within less than thirty years, become a commonplace. It neither irritates nor infuriates people today.

Inpia has had her iconoclasts too; but they did not agitate themselves over such mundane problems as sex, morality, or economics. To quote Plotinus, they strove "from the Alone to the Alone." They did not get entangled in the human crowd, with its silly little worries and cares; they kept aloof from the insignificant little day-to-day conflicts of the instincts and passions of men and women in the mass. They only fought against themselves, their own ego. Whereas Shaw has fought only against the ego of others and tried to foist on it his own, which he has always considered to be unique. His iconoclasm led him not to the elimination of his unique self, but its enthronement on the altar of fickle public opinion. He has rode many hobby-horses, each in its own turn, Fabianism, Femininism, Ibsenism and Communism. And now Fascism in grand old age!

None of the iconcolasts in India, however, ever tried to upset a single Apple Cart; they never said things that were Too True to be Good, but only those that were too good to be true. They did not mix up grave messages with gay; they trod the path of high seriousness. Shaw expects that he should be heard now and here; they expected that they would be heard in the great beyond and hereafter.

If Shaw were to try to convert India to his ideas by means of the lighter qualities, he would try in vain. Here in this country we distinguish between jest and wisdom, and so we cannot be expected to take in earnest what is uttered in jest. This might sound ‘paradoxical’ to Shaw! But this is only characteristic of India which Shaw, to our regret, did not care to explore when he had the chance. Yes, we have read his masterpiece, An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, but to be quite honest, we have better ideas of the intelligence of our womenfolk than Shaw has of his. Nevertheless, below the surface of all his ragging and fooling, we sometimes do see the hard core of his ideas which are hardly so foolish as the follies they laugh at. Shaw is a mental tonic, and a dose or two of him once in a while might do us a lot of good.

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