BY C. L. R. SASTRI

I do not know whether by writing under the above caption I lay myself open to the charge of lese majesty to howsoever slight an extent. The fact is that there is a kind of implicit copyright in these things: which implicit copyright has a tendency, if I may borrow a phrase from the legal text-books, to ripen by prescription, like many other cognate matters. To infringe such a title is far from my intention. Besides, I have, it will be noticed, taken ample care to make an alteration in the operative part of that jumble of words. In one sense, of course, there is not much difference between a cup of tea and a cup of coffee. Both are beverages, and both are mildly stimulating; and both are most indubitably in the fashion. Nowadays, when one drinks anything, apart from the pure element, one drinks, whatever be the season, either the first or the second. (My observations, I need hardly remind my readers, are confined to the country of my birth: I am only too well aware that, in more hardened climes, requiring stronger ‘pick-me-ups,’ recourse is had to liquids of proportionate potency.)

There is, then, a lot of resemblance between tea and coffee and, if that were all, my change of heading would be tantamount to no change at all. But, underlying this superficial resemblance there is a good deal of subtle distinction also; and, in my opinion, the latter far outweighs the former. ‘Over a Cup of Tea’, no doubt, sounds simpler: it is more easily ‘understanded’ of the children of men. But–i speak subject to correction–‘Over a Cup of Coffee’ has the more resonant intonation. It is more alliterative–like Fluellen’s ‘Macedon’ and ‘Monmouth’ (‘and there is salmons in both.’) And, last, not least, it is more accurate–in my case. That, I suppose, is, after all, the clinching argument. So far as the first person singular is concerned, there is a much greater sense of realism in it. At one fell swoop, as it were, it accomplishes two objects: it contrivers that it shall be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.’

As a South Indian I am properly addicted to coffee, taking tea only when the tastier healthier, more aristocratic beverage is not available. Naturally, even if someone else had not preceded me in writing under the caption, ‘Over a Cup of Tea,’ I should have chosen my present phrase, ‘Over a Cup of Coffee’; and now that someone else has thus preceded me, I am under a double provocation to employ that in preference to the other. As for any intention of entering into competition with my predecessor, that, of course, is ruled out as soon as it is Posed. One usually does not do such a rash thing as to oppose oneself in the lists to a veteran. It is sheer madcappery. Then, again, there is another difficulty. If in the domain of law, possession is nine-tenths of ownership, in the vastly different region of journalism, priority is at least seven-eigths of success. By sheer weight of that, one can generally bear one’s rival down. No: rivalry, competition, crossing of pens, et hoc genus omne, are completely out of the question. They are not my cup of coffee. What we have to do here is only the spirit of emulation, that is all: the entirely proper ambition to walk in the footsteps of our betters and, wherever possible, to beat them on their own ground. Nor are our betters likely to feel any chagrin over, that, as they will, doubtless, apply to themselves these lines of Walt Whitman:

"I am the teacher of athletes,

He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own

proves the width of my own,

He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy

the teacher."

Now that the matches connected with the Ranji Trophy have happily concluded, a few words of mine on sport in general may not be altogether out of place. I am, unfortunately, not a cricketer. In the days when I used to cbase a ball, it was either with foot or with racket; and, on very rare occasions, with stick. Somehow I never could bring myself to view cricket as a game worthy of a man’s prowess. It may be the ‘king of games’ all right, but I have always been a republican at heart, and so could do without the royal touch in sport. It seems to me that, speaking purely as a layman, cricket has been written up more than it deserves. A vast literature has grown up around it and is steadily increasing in volume:

All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf,

The latest edition fifty volumes long,’

says Browing’s Bishop Blougram; and a like predicament is in store for cricket. The only thing that can be said in its favour is that most of it is exceedingly readable. I have known tennis fans who have waxed really eloquent over their own particular doxy; and there are two or three rugby-football enthusiasts who convey the impression that their pens also can be inspired at will. I have not scoured sporting journals for expert reports on badminton and water-polo, but I am certain that diligent research can track them to their lair. Boxing has its devotees, and Hazlitt’s description of the fight between Bill Neate and the Gasman is among the world’s classics; and, in our own day, Mr. Bernard Shaw has not disdained to give of his best to fisticuffs–especially when his, as well as my, idol, Georges Carpentier, was one of the contestors. I have not yet forgotten his memorable article on the Carpentier-Beckett fight in the columns of the old Nation. That bout was so remarkable that another great writer, the late Mr. Arnold Bennett, was commissioned to write on it in the columns of the New Statesman.

George Borrow was another author who loved boxing, and in Lavengro he has depicted an excellent scene of a fight, that, namely, between Lavengro himself and that terror of the country-side, the Flying Tinman, alias ‘the half-and-half,’ Anselo Herne. He has even given us a female character, the immortal Isopel Berners, who reveled in boxing phrases and in boxing itself, of which, indeed, she was no mean exponent. Her favourite blow, if you will remember, was the ‘Long Melford,’ as she called it; and in that sequel to Lavengro, The Romany Rye, we find these words of hers in her farewell letter to her erstwhile partner in ‘Mumper’s Dingle’:

"Fear God, and take your own part. There’s Bible in that, young man: see how Moses feared God, and how he took his own part against everybody who meddled with him. And see how David feared God, and took his own part against all the bloody enemies who surrounded him–so fear God, young man and never give in! The world can bully, and is fond, provided it sees a man in a kind of difficulty, of getting about him, calling him coarse names, and even going so far as to hustle him: but the world, like all bullies, carries a white feather in its tail, and no sooner sees the man taking off his coat, and offering to fight its best, than it scatters here and there, and is always civil to him afterwards. So when folks are disposed to ill-treat you, young man, say, ‘Lord have mercy upon me!’ and then tip them Long Melford, to which, as the saying goes, there is nothing comparable for shortness all the world over."

‘The nobleness of life is to do this’, said Antony, and kissed Cleopatra. ‘The nobleness of life is to do this’, said the late Miss Katherine Mayo, and wrote her magnum opus, ‘Mother India’. The impulse, it will be seen, is the same in both cases. It is nothing less than love. And, as if to make assurance doubly sure, she confided to an interviewer, close upon the publication of her book, that she had the cause of the people of this poor country very much at heart. In fact, she gave utterance to this sentiment on more than one occasion. She might, I feel, have spared herself the trouble: we had known it already. ‘It is’, in the words of the imperturbable Sam Weller, ‘what is called a self-evident proposition, as Cates–the meat-man–said to the house maid when she said he was no gentleman.’ Moreover, one does not write a book like ‘Mother India’ and fail to impress its readers as to the precise nature of the feelings that prompted it. No: that is palpably impossible. We make no doubt of Miss Mayo’s unbounded affection for us: only, we must be excused if we do not approve either of the form taken by it, or of the spirit in which it has been exhibited.

My present subject is neither Miss Mayo herself, nor her book, or books. Quite a lot of contentious literature has accumulated around both, like barnacles around a ship’s bottom or precedents around the main body of law, and it is not my purpose, here and now, to contribute my quota to it: the cup if I may say so, is already full to overflowing. My intention, rather, is to make her my spring-board–a sort of jumping-off ground, in fact–for my disquisition.

Both Miss Mayo and others of her persuasion are passionately fond of attacking our religion–directly as well as indirectly. In fact, their life-work, as conceived by themselves, would be incomplete, would be a sort of broken arc, if they did not, at certain frequently recurring intervals, have a fling or two at our sacred things: just by way of shoulder-loosening, so to speak, just to keep themselves in practice. And they set about it with touching piety. Indeed, their unanimity of purpose is remarkable–is marvellous. One after another says the same thing over again only in a louder and more blatant voice.

‘The stubborn spearmen still made good,

The dark impenetrable wood,

Each stepping where his foeman stood

The Instant that he fell’

They are all crusaders in the same sacred cause: even to the extent of going headlong per fas et nefas to their object of ridding our cherished faith of what, in their opinion, are putrid excrescences. The old gentleman in Romany Rye, it will be remembered, found his deliverance in studying Chinese; and I am almost inclined to believe that the present-day Westerners find their deliverance in falling foul of everything Oriental, especially of everything Hindu. But, fortunately, we, Hindus, are not essentially the poorer for it. As some one has said, ‘You do not rob anything of its value to its possesor by treating it with scientific contempt, or with artistic condescension.’

The main charge against us is–or seems to be–that we are excessively superstitious, inordinately dependent upon mystic signs, esoteric rites, and all such abracadabra: on top of all of which old-fashioned junk, on top of all of which flotsam and jetsam of outworn creeds and forsaken faiths, we are (0 tempora! 0 mores!) idolaters, naked and unashamed. But, I submit in bated breath and whispering humbleness, we idolize God: whereas the West (again I say sotto voce) idolize Mammon in all its manifestations. There is at least a hint of God in our idols: I shall be happy to know what hint of God there is in multi-millionaires, cinema-actresses, trans-Atlantic fliers, champion-boxers, and all such wild-fowl. Our enemies point out to us that we are sunk beyond redemption in the mire of superstition. But our superstitions (or the most of them) have, in the last resort, some sort of foundation in sense. I should like to believe the same of the superstitions of the West. And, anyway, what is superstition? Listen to Emerson: a Westerner speaking to Westerners:

‘We boast of our emancipation from many superstitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Zove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides of the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day–if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or the threat of assault or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution, or murder? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?’ (My Italics.)

That is the stuff to give them! Emerson as usual, hits the nail on the head. The label of superstition may be attached to lots more things ‘than are dreamt of in our philosophies, Horatio!’ And even in regard to the commoner matters, what fine shade of difference, I ask, is there between, say, my refusal to start on a journey on a particular day, or at a particular time of a particular day, and the Westerner’s at first sight equally muddle-headed refusal to form members of a party of thirteen, or to walk under a ladder or to receive certain kinds of presents, or to do (or to refrain from doing) anyone of the thousand and one things with which we have been made familiar either through hearsay, or through actual contact with them in the rough and tumble of day-to-day life? To my unsophisticated intelligence, at any rate, there seems to be none. In these matters we are all either equally foolish, or equally wise: we are blood-brothers, in fact. As Kipling puts it:

‘The Colonel’s lady and Judith O’ Grady

Are sisters under their skins?

If there is a difference between our superstitions and those of our traducers, it is, I think, mainly this. We make no bones as the saying is, about our superstitions. We are completely above board in our dealings with them. We lay all our cards on the table. In fact, I shall go so far as to say that we wear our superstitions on our sleeves–‘for doves to peck at.’ With the result that, as we know to our cost, ‘the doves’ (in the shape of the Westerners) have not been slow to ‘peck’ at them. There is, really, if one comes to think about it, an open-airness about our superstitions, that is almost disarming. At any rate, our superstitions do no harm to anybody. The superstitions of the Westerners are more subtle: there is, if I may say so, more art in them. Certainly they–or some of them–are not on the surface: we have to dive ‘deeper than e’er plummet sounded’ locate them. They are everywhere and that is why sometimes we are hard put to it to specify where they are. Our superstitions are, at best, localised: theirs envelop their lives completely. Emerson gave ‘a local habitation and a name’ to them–as only he, with his wonderful percipience, could–in the passage I quoted above from his well-known essay on ‘Character.’ In a word, the Westerners (God bless them!) are steeped in superstition: and, like the dyer’s hand, are subdued to what they work in.

In this connection, I may point out that the Nation of London, some years ago, started a ‘Questionaire’ in its columns to ascertain the proportion of believers and non-believers in God in England. The results showed that the number of non-believers far exceeded that of believers. Curiously enough these are the very people that, every now and then, shower an incessant rain of abuse upon us. If it had not actually happened, no one would have believed it; it would be excruciatingly funny were it not so painfully tragic.

‘Who but must laugh if such a man there be?

Who would not weep if Atticus were he?’

Westerners generally, and Englishmen and Americans in particular, pride themselves on Possessing a sense of humour. Why, then, does it desert them when they are dealing with Orientals? ‘Manners makyth a man.’ But, apparently, they do not make a nation; and the very first thing that Westerners have to learn is to behave decently towards Easterners. But you cannot, as the saying is, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and, mutatis mutandis, you cannot expect the commonest decency from races whose whole mentality is top-heavy with a most overweening pride.

Harking back to this subject of superstition, I take leave to say that there is no end to the fun each person can make of the other’s superstitions. Just as it has been said that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, I may say that one man’s superstition is another man’s skepticism. The wisest course is to cultivate a healthy respect for the superstitions that we do not like or possess. In this matter, we are all living in glass-houses and it is not for the likes of us to indulge in the vicious game of stone-throwing. The fact is that if certain ideas exert, or are allowed to exert, a strangle-hold upon us, to the utter exclusion of others, are made to dominate our minds day and night to such an extent that, to adapt Emerson’s words in regard to Burns’s songs,

‘the wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them, nay, the music-boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand-organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires,’

then we are said to have a bee in our bonnets: in. other words, we have become a prey to superstition, we have become superstitious with respect to those ideas. In this way we may say that Mahatma Gandhi is superstitious with reference to hand-spinning and the charka, that the Nazis are superstitious with reference to Jew-baiting, that the Russians are superstitious with reference to communism, that our rulers are superstitious with reference to our communal differences and our so-called consequent inability to govern ourselves, and so on and so forth. All of us, of course, are not made of this stern stuff. We take the world as we find it, we are happy-go-lucky, like the bees we go to this flower of an idea now, and to that flower of an idea an instant later, and so make a mess of life–come to nothing; in fact, we most ignominiously fail to know or realise ourselves as Carlyle was never tired of exhorting us to do. In spite of this handicap, however, we, too, in our several ways, are superstitious, if only the truth were known–if not incessantly, at any rate intermittently. My contention is that, in the larger sense of the term, we should not be ashamed of being superstitious: on the contrary, we should bend all the muscles of our will to attain, to that O altitude. Whatever we feel, we should strive to feel fiercely, we should strive to feel in every fibre of our being, in every cell of our body and mind; we should, in other words, boil over with enthusiasm. What is religion if it is not enthusiasm first and foremost? Even the kingdom of Heaven, it has been said suffereth violence: your lukewarm fellows, those whom Wordsworth characterized as being conscious of the nicely calculated less or more’, will not, I am sure, succeed in getting even near the gates of it, not to speak of entering them. In my connotation of the term, superstition is nothing but enthusiasm; and enthusiasm is–or so I take it to be–eminently good.

There is this danger in scorning superstition, that we never know where we shall fetch up in the end; as the saying is, in for a penny, in for a pound. It is like the tiger’s first taste of human blood. It is like the slippery slope from where, once our feet slip, we go down to the bitter bottom, like the Gadarene Swine. Once we are subjected to this disease we do not pause in our feverish desire to question the validity of everything under the sun–from a lady’s commerce with her looking-glass to man’s intercourse with his Maker. As Browning says:

‘To such a process, I discern no end.

Cutting off one excrescence to see two:

There is ever a next in size, now grown as big,

That meets the knife. I cut and cut again;

First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last

But Fichte’s clever cut at God Himself?’

One of my ambitions is, and always has been, to be the ‘strong, silent man’ beloved of our modern political historians. I am, I earnestly hope, ‘strong’ but, alas, decidedly not ‘silent.’ It is, perhaps, in a manner of speaking, begging the question, because a man that is in the habit of contributing articles and essays to the papers every now and then may pretend to several things but certainly not to silence. It is not–worse luck!–through the mouth alone that we betray what is within. Written words, it seems to me, have the same ill-effect. However much one may be naturally astute one cannot but reveal at least a portion of oneself to others by scribbling one’s thoughts down on paper. On the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, it cannot but be that those heiroghyphics serve the function of ambassadors between the writer and the reader. It so happens that, hourly, and even minutely, we are giving ourselves away in sundry diverse fashions. One may not shrug a shoulder or lift an eye-brow without calling on the heavens to witness what sort of a person one actually is. If, as Emerson phrases it, we ere averse to ‘spilling our souls,’–why, then, we have nothing for it but to immure ourselves in a cave or on some desert island. So long as we elect to move among fellow human beings we have no option but to make ourselves a ‘motley to the view’ a thousand times in a day. One’s inner privacy is a fortress that is being continually stormed by a variegated assortment of forces, armed with a multitudinous array of weapons–pick-axes, cutlasses, tanks, muskets, machine-guns, et hoc genus omne. In sleep also–wonder of wonders!–we do not entirely forget our identity but must needs often babble and–tip the fat into the fire……To what do all these signs and portents point? To but one thing, and that is that the ‘featherless biped’ commonly known as man–homo sapiens–craves inordinately for self-expression, whether waking or sleeping or (horrible to contemplate!) even after shuffling off this mortal coil. Rather a ticklish business–is it not?–and calling for, as Herman Melville would have put it, a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics.

I have remarked that one of my ambitions is to be the ‘strong, silent man,’ beloved of modern political historians. The strength, I contended, is there, but not the silence. I have never ceased to bemoan this. There might have been a time in the history of the world when exuberance was reckoned a virtue, but I am afraid that that time has long since become quite out-moded. I am thoroughly convinced that, as a human quality, exuberance can never be too much over-rated, because I am convinced that it partakes of the angelic touch. But, then, angels do not visit the earth nowadays, and so the proper audience to appreciate it is conspicuous by its absence. It is always like that. In countries where rank is regarded but as the ‘guinea-stamp,’ and a man is a man "for a’ that," the ceremony known as a ‘coronation’ naturally loses all its significance, and people will hardly abandon their hearths and homes and run pell-mell to be on the spot, as though not to be there were a sin against the Holy Ghost. In places where the flesh of animals and birds is the staple diet even such priceless vegetables as potatoes and cauliflowers and sweet peas will be definitely consigned to the dust-heap–just as, where strict vegetarianism is the rule, even ‘Bellamy’s pork-pies’ (the last mortal wish of Pitt the Younger) will be surely left to look after themselves. The times in which we are living are not exactly propitiatory for that carelessness of largesse which is known as exuberance. Those who, having an infinity of the mind’s and heart’s riches, love to fling their treasure abroad with the recklessness of Omar’s rose:

"Look to the Rose that blows about us–‘Lo,

Laughing,’ she says, ‘into the world I blow.

At once the silken tassel of my Purse

Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw’,"

–those, I say, who, having an infinity of the mind’s and heart’s riches, love to fling their treasures abroad with the recklessness of Omar’s rose, are, in my humble opinion, in this fourth decade of the twentieth century, asking for trouble. There is no longer any room for a Dickens or a Thackeray, for a Charles Reade or for a Charlotte Bronte. These are the days of the small writers –of your T. S. Eliots and of your David Garnetts so also in the broader sphere of life in general. If you are content to be petty and peevish and mean and silent, you can–well, open the world like an oyster. Be large-hearted and continue–in spite of repeated rebuffs–to believe in human nature, and you will find yourself sooner or later–sooner rather than later–relegated to the scrap-heap.

That is all the law, and most of the prophets. No: the strong, silent man’ I shall worship from afar, but I am afraid that I shall never be able to become one myself. That ambition of mine, alas, must remain unfulfilled to the last–like all my other ambitions.

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