BY N. RAGHUNATHAN ¹

"Western Europe is the seat of the world’s highest and most influential culture," said Prof. Julian Huxley the other day. This is one of those prosperous half-truths against which reason is powerless. Culture, like trade, follows the flag; and this accounts largely for the undoubted vogue that Western culture enjoys. But those born to it not unnaturally assume that its influence is due to an intrinsic superiority over other cultures. And such are the power of propaganda and the prestige that goes with success that the imported article has tended to oust the indigenous variety in most of the lands which it has invaded. In India, opposition to the material power of the West has been off-set by the insidious and ubiquitous penetration of European culture. The history of the intelligentsia is the history of this paradox.

The intelligentsia in India is almost exclusively recruited from the small English-educated-class: a cardinal fact from which its peculiarities and limitations derive. The Wood Dispatch of 1854 brought about an educational revolution. The first fruits of the new learning were typical Victorians nurtured on Macaulay and uplift. They affected a strange medley of clothes but they had orderly minds. Their English was superlatively good, and so were their manners. They were on the best of terms with both the old world and the new. They kept the caste-mark and discreetly flirted with Rationalism. Their interests, if narrow, were all-absorbing. At school or college they rarely opened a book that was not a text-book. But forty years later, they could reproduce from memory whole pages from the few books they had conned. They were supremely competent at their jobs, but had no hobbies, unless their seasonal and spasmodic politics might be so described. They were great optimists who believed that India’s tutelage was for her good and that progress in a straight line was an immutable law of nature. They were happily busy most of the time making money; for money was power, the symbol of the conquering West to which this generation paid the uncritical homage that only a complete stranger can give.

With the turn of the century, the intelligentsia enters on a new phase. The cheerful philistine has given place to the Hamlet of the pial and the free reading-room. Leadership has passed from the prosperous lawyer to the not so prosperous lawyer, from the high official to the brilliant graduate eating out his heart in ill-paid clerical work or school-mastering. We have come, in fact, to our own age, which History will know as the Age of the Disinherited. Its unhappy lot has been to fall between two stools. This pre-war generation did three things. It re-discovered the past, it discovered Nationalism, and it came under the sovereign sway of Science. But while it sentimentalised over India’s glorious heritage, it left Sanskrit learning in the safe-keeping of Western Orientalists. Science destroyed its faith without widening its horizon. And its clamorous Nationalism diverted attention from the beginnings of a subtle spiritual conquest. The intelligentsia, while it spurned the West and denied it virtue began to see with the eyes of its adversary and think with its mind.

This was partly the result of education, partly of environment. The break-up of the old way of life under the impact of an alien and aggressive civilisation had resulted not only in the abolition of the social sanctions which had buttressed it but also in the obscuring of the values which had sustained and ennobled it. And a system of education that ignored the mother tongue, reduced the most splendid classical literature that the world has known to the position of a museum-exhibit, and forced the young idea into the straight waist-coat of a foreign language, was not calculated to redress the balance. This destruction of the old thought-moulds was perhaps an essential historical process, and will, one hopes, prove the prelude to a new and richer crystallisation of the Indian genius: but of the immediate loss and impoverishment it involved there could be no doubt. The aridity of our intellectual and emotional life has been remarked even by sympathetic observers. In art, literature and the other manifestations of the human spirit, our record is bleak if not a blank. The national preoccupation with uncreative politics has no doubt contributed to this sterility. But the principal cause is the rootlessness of the intelligentsia.

The fumbling and uncertainty that characterised its first attempts at creating a nation was due to its isolation. The mass awakening, which is the major event in the history of modern India, would have been impossible if the intelligentsia had not laboured long and hard, preparing the ground. But in those years politics was largely a parlour-game; for the moulders of public opinion held the public at arm’s length. This aloofness from the masses which the intelligentsia cultivated was not so much from suspicion as from lack of a means of communication. It spoke an idiom which the multitude did not understand, though it was fascinated by the strange cadences. The difficulty was not one of language, but of psychology. For unlike the intelligentsia, the masses, though submerged, have remained essentially Indian; the remnants of a traditional culture still inform the habit of their mind, such as it is. They have characteristically given their allegiance always to personal qualities rather than to any body of intellectual principle. Its purity, selflessness, idealism–virtues which India has always prized–won for the intelligentsia a popular respect which concealed the fact that its message was but imperfectly understood. Mass-awakening, when it came in a flood, was the work of other hands, of dynamic personalities who, though they were drawn from the educated class, had little in common with it in temper and outlook. They spoke a language that appealed to the heart and aroused elemental urges.

Today the needs of constructive nationalism call aloud for intellectual leadership. But action was never the strong suit of the intelligentsia. The strains and stresses it has felt have vivified its perceptions and quickened its responses wonderfully, but seem to have robbed it of initiative. Its most engaging trait is an abounding catholicity, a hospitality to new ideas which knows no limits; but its failure to discriminate often lays it open to the gibe that it has been at a feast of all the ‘isms’ and stolen the scraps. It displays a freedom from prejudice which would be truly admirable if it did not so obviously cloak the lack of an underlying consistency. Its ability to get into the skin of another is positively uncanny, but an infinite adaptability does not Inspire confidence. The Englishman who religiously sits down to his solitary dinner in a dress coat in the sweltering heat of equatorial Africa at least obeys an obscure impulse to safeguard his self-respect. The Indian who imitates this ritual from a muddled feeling that it is somehow necessary to his own self-respect is merely a figure of fun. But he is tragic, too, as all frustration is tragic. The pathological hankering for testimonials from successful Europe, the tendency to praise itself and to blame others for the wrong reasons, the habit of mimicking thought and using words as counters, the inability to distinguish between means and ends–these are the stigmata of a generation that has lost its sense of values and tries to comfort itself with cheap counterfeits.

Motley is not coat of mail; and borrowed ideologies are broken reeds. Thus, while our indignation flames up at atrocity stories in Central Europe, our domestic urgencies are apt to leave us cold or causistical. This is even truer of the post-war generation of youth now growing to manhood and responsibility. They deserve sympathy; for they are the orphans of the storm that has blown from Europe for over a century; it has left them without even the tatters of a cultural outfit. Indian ideals and modes of thought are a sealed book to them and they would cheerfully bury it five fathoms deep. They rejoice in their bareness, not knowing what they have lost. And, like their parents, they too love to mouth phrases minted abroad.

But if they lack the humour that is the saving grace of their elders, they lack the sense of frustration too. If they are narrow and intolerant, they have an intense belief in themselves and want to do things instead of merely talking about them. The more propitious times that are coming may see the fruition of their dreams. The Indian languages are again coming into their own; and though our young men despise the past, their ambitions for the mother-tongue must lead them back to the immemorial culture in which alone is refreshment. And the service of the masses may prove their salvation by calling out the best in them.

A measure of skill in the individual citizen, a modicum of knowledge, and a habit of co-operative thinking–these must become universal in a country that claims to be civilised. Science and a social conscience are the instruments that must be used by the rising generation of the intelligentsia to effect this revolution. But the terrible plight in which Western civilisation finds itself today should serve as a warning that science and a secular outlook are not enough for building the Great Society. We must not only re-establish the continuity of culture which is the secret of national vitality. The deathless spirit of India must again become referee to all our acts and thoughts.

For India still holds the key to the art of living–that grand art of attaining serenity without skipping experience, of achieving a full life without accumulating possessions, of awakening ardour without doping the mind. The antagonisms of man and society, matter and spirit, freedom and discipline are happily reconciled in a culture whose base is the individual and whose apex is humanity. The man who can truthfully say, "My mind to me a kingdom is," will need neither to quarrel nor to compromise with his environment. India has no ambition to reform the world by force. Her instinct is to respect the integrity of nature, to abhor propagandistic violence. But she can show the way to enduring freedom.