Letters from a Young Poet (21 page)

… We're ready to put up with mental torture, but cannot accept that the mind become inert. From this we may conclude that man does not want happiness but progress—he doesn't mind unhappiness as much as he does decline.

Cuttack
February 1893

In the first place, you know I can't stand the sight of these Englishmen in India. They habitually look down on us, they don't have an iota of
sympathy
for us, and, on top of that, to have to
exhibit
one's self to them is truly painful for me. So much so that I don't have the slightest inclination to enter even their theatres or shops (except for Thacker's
^†
). Even a great big cow born in an English home feels he's superior to every person in our country—that always hits me hard. Until they concede that we have something in us, we have to approach them with servility every time or be humiliated. Sometimes I feel so unbearably angry with the people of our country! Not because they aren't getting rid of these Englishmen here, but because they don't do a thing
about anything at all—they can't demonstrate their superiority in any field. They don't even have that aim in mind—all they do is pick up the peacock feathers the English have plucked and tuck them into their tails and keep dancing around in this strange fashion—they don't feel the slightest shame or humiliation in doing so. They don't want to teach our countrymen anything, they look down on our country's language, they're indifferent to anything that the Englishman doesn't pay attention to—they think they're going to become important people if they form the Congress and raise their folded hands in supplication to the government. My personal opinion is that until we can do something for ourselves it is better for us to remain in exile. After all, since we really do deserve such indignity, in the name of what do we plead for self-respect in front of others? Will it suffice only to learn how to shake our tails exactly like them? Only when we establish ourselves in the world, when we can contribute to the work of the world, shall we be able to smile and talk with them. Until then it's better to hide away and shut up and keep doing our own work. The people of our country think just the opposite—whatever work is done out of sight, whatever has to be done privately, they dismiss as unimportant, and that which is completely short-lived and impermanent, mere gesture and ornament, that's what they lean towards. Ours is the most wretched country. It's very difficult here to keep one's strength of mind so one can work. There's no one to really help you. You cannot find a single person within ten or twenty miles with whom you can exchange a few words and feel alive—nobody thinks, nobody feels, nobody works; nobody has any experience of a great undertaking or a life worth living; you will not be able to find an instance of mature humanity anywhere. All these people seem to be wandering around like ghosts. They eat, go to office, sleep, smoke, and chatter and chatter like complete idiots. When they speak of feeling they become
sentimental
, and when they speak of reason they become childish. Man thirsts to be in the company of real men, one longs for a give and take, an
argumentation and quarrel of thoughts and ideas. But there are no real flesh-and-blood solid men to be found—all are phantoms, floating like vapour in a disconnected way in this world. I don't think there's anybody lonelier and more isolated in this country than the man who has one or two
ideas
in his head. I don't know how this train of thought has got going—but this is my most heartfelt complaint. Much of the disenchantment of life stems from this lack of real people.

Baliya
Tuesday, 7 February 1893

I don't feel like travelling any more—I really feel like creating a den in a corner so I can be alone. India has two sides to it—one of domesticity, the other of renunciation; there are some who don't move from the corner of the house, while some are absolutely homeless. I have both these sides of India in me. The corner of the home is attractive to me, and the outside too calls to me. I really feel like travelling and seeing, but then again the tired, frantic mind craves a nest. Like a bird, you know. A small nest to stay in and a vast sky to fly in. I love the corner only to give my mind a rest. My mind wants to keep working relentlessly in its interiority, but its enthusiasm for work keeps stumbling upon crowds of people at every step and is thwarted until it becomes frantic—then it seems to keep hurting me from within its cage. The moment it gets a little solitude it's able to quench its desires, to think, to look around on every side, to express its feelings in the most elaborately detailed way possible. It goes too far sometimes—it seems unable to even put up with the fact that … has accompanied me here. Day and night it wants complete, un-fragmented free time. It is happy only when I don't exchange a word with anybody the entire day. It wants
to reign over its own kingdom of thoughts and feelings in the same way that the creator is alone amidst his creations. Otherwise it's as if all its power, all its being is frustrated…. Is this what is called
misanthropy
? Not exactly. It's not as if I want to stay at a distance from people because I don't like them, it's just that my mind wants a lot of space to move about and do its work.

Cuttack
10 February 1893

It is the lame man who finds the ditch. As it is I can't stand these
Anglo-Indian
s, and on top of that yesterday at the
dinner table
I had occasion once more to observe their crude behaviour. The
Principal
of the
college
here is an uncouth Englishman—huge nose, crafty eyes, one and a half foot of a jaw, clean-shaven, bass voice, a strangulated pronunciation that cannot articulate the letter ‘r'—all in all a most complete and mature John Bull. He really had it in for the people of our country. You know, I think, of the intense objections everywhere against the
government's
attempt to change the
jury
system in our country. This man forced the subject upon us and began to argue with Bo——babu. Said the
moral standard
in this country was
low
, people here did not have enough belief in the
sacredness of life
, so they're not fit to be in a
jury
. How do I describe to you what I was feeling! My blood boiled, but I couldn't find any words. So many things came to my mind as I lay in bed, but at that time I seemed to have become completely mute. Just think of it, Bob, to be invited to a Bengali's house, to sit among Bengalis and not to feel embarrassed to speak in this manner—what sort of opinion do they have of us! And why! Forget about
sympathy
, these are people who don't even think it necessary to behave politely with us—why do we even go anywhere near them—to smile and
smile, and brush against them, and sacrifice our honour for a love affair with them, Bob? At the slightest handshake of favour on their part, why are our entire bodies and souls immediately transformed into a mass of
jelly
, trembling and wobbling from top to toe? Ooh, how proud they are, how scornful! And as for us, what poverty, what lowliness! It's bad enough to swallow the insults and keep quiet, but on top of that to go and sidle up to them and ask for their affection—I feel that's the lowest point one can reach. Let us draw this wretched, insulted, scorned Bhāratbarsha of ours to our hearts, let us try carefully to mend and to forgive all her faults, all her weaknesses, all her deficiency—let us not push her away from our hearts because all her thoughts and ways are not in tune with our minds! If our own country keeps us at a distance because of some mistaken orthodoxy, why do we instantly move away without a word, but when the sahebs openly beat us with brooms and kick us a hundred times, the diehards will still refuse to be evicted from under their feet or from their doorways. Where they do not allow us to wear shoes we take off our shoes and go, where they do not allow us to raise our heads high we bow our heads in salaam and enter, where our fellow people are not allowed entry we turn up disguised as sahebs. They don't want us to go and sit in their meetings, to participate in their amusements, to interfere in their work—but still we try, we hawk our wares, we find an opportunity, we flatter them, we keep our own people at a distance and join in when our race is criticized, we digest every insult to our country—we feel vindicated if we can just be near them in any way possible. I don't want to dress up as an
exception
, but if you have no respect at all for our race, I don't want to act civilized and be your pet. I will stay among my own people and do my duty with all the love in my heart—you will never hear of it or notice it. I don't have the slightest expectation for the scraps of your leftovers, for the fragments of your affection—I kick them away. Your affection is to me what the pig is to the Muslim. It makes me lose caste—really lose it—the degradation of the self is
what really makes you lose caste—it destroys your standing in a moment—what pride can I retain after that! Let us not have any respect at all for those who buy outer pomp and ceremony after having destroyed their true worth within. I will not be ashamed to call the most miserable farmer in the most ramshackle hut in our country one of my own people, but if I ever feel tempted to keep the company of those who dress in tip-top style and go about in
dogcarts
and call us
niggers
, however civilized or high-up they may be, let me be beaten soundly on the head with a shoe. Yesterday my head and my heart were hurting so much that I could not sleep all night—I kept tossing and turning in my bed. When I had gone and sat down in one corner of that drawing room, it all appeared like a shadow in front of my eyes—it was as if I could see all of this great country spread out before me, as if I was sitting by the head of this humble, unhappy and wretched motherland—such a vast, disconsolate feeling overwhelmed my whole heart—what can I say? Yet in front of me were memsahebs in
evening dress
and the murmur of English conversation and laughter was in my ear—all together such discordance! How true our eternal Bhāratbarsha was to me, and this
dinner table
, with its sugary English smiles and polite English conversation, how empty, how false, how deeply untrue! When the mems were talking in their low, sweet, cultivated voices, I was thinking of you all, oh wealth of my country. After all, you are of this Bhāratbarsha.

Cuttack
15 February 1893

Then we read a few more of his poems. I find it impossible to praise falsely just in order to be polite, but, on the other hand, to quickly suppress the thorn of criticism and talk coherently is very
difficult. One has to constantly hum and haw like an idiot. When he asked me, ‘Should I continue to write poems?' I said, ‘Why not? Poems are not written only for other people to hear them. They have a joy of their own. If other people don't appreciate them, I feel that that joy is enough reward in itself.' I don't think he was too excited by these encouraging words of mine. It's not that his poems are really bad, they're just okay, that's all. Some people pass in the first division, and others fail in the first division. But it's only those who pass who get sectioned into various divisions; we don't find it necessary to give those who fail different divisions—they all fall into the same group. If I had said to him, among all those unknown, unpublished writers of poetry who have failed, you are in the first or second division, would he have derived the slightest satisfaction from that? It's better to remain silent than to issue
certificates
. There are so many good students in the university who fail in maths; similarly, those who fail in poetry generally fail in music. They have feeling, they have words, they have a manner, there's no dearth of preparation, but they just don't have the music that would, in a moment, turn all of it into poetry. It's very difficult to show them that. There is wood, and there is the breath to kindle it, just the spark to make the whole thing catch fire is missing. You may have worked hard to bring that load of wood from many other places, but that tiny spark of flame is within your self—if that little bit is not there, then a pile as high as a mountain fails to accomplish anything. This is what I had said about Kamini Sen's poetry as well. There may be quite a lot in her writing that has a great deal of feeling and even a lot of new feeling, but none of it has caught fire. If somebody protests, ‘No, no, it's very poetic,' who's going to argue with that? That's why I don't like to discuss poetry unless I can praise it. But, Bob, I've still not forgotten the audacity of that Englishman yesterday. He blithely said that we have no idea about the
sacredness of life
! These are the people who exterminated the
Red Indians
of
America
, who had no qualms in shooting down even helpless, weak
Australian
women like hunted animals for no
reason and no fault of their own, who cannot be tried by one of our countrymen if they murder one of us; they come to the timid, pitiful Hindu and
preach sacredness of life
and
high standard of morals
? Anyway, what's the point of lamenting something of this sort?

Puri
14 February 1893

Some people have minds like the
wet plate
of a photograph. The picture you take has to be printed immediately on paper, or it spoils. My mind is of that kind. Whenever I see something picturesque, I think, I must write to Bob about this properly. After that, before I even realize it, new impressions keep getting stamped on it until it fades away. I travelled from Cuttack to Puri—there's so much to describe of this journey! If I had the time to write down what I'd seen on the day that I saw it, the picture could have come through much better—but a few days of confusion have gone by in between, and in the meantime the finer details of the images have been obscured. One of the main reasons for this is that ever since we've reached Puri I've spent every moment looking at the sea in front of us, it's captured my mind completely—I don't have the time to turn around and look back at our long journey. But I don't want to entirely leave out those few days from my letter to you. Instead of suddenly creating a gap in my daily descriptions, let me write down a brief history of the last few days for you.

On Saturday afternoon, after lunch, Bolu, Bihari-babu and I got into a hired
phaeton
carriage and spread out our blankets and bedding, and, with three pillows tucked behind three backs, and a
cāprāśi
[orderly] perched upon the
coachbox
, started our journey…. The rivers here dry up when the rains are over; Cuttack is situated by the side of two such rivers. One of these is called the
Mahanadi, and the other is called the Kathjuri. We had to cross the Kathjuri on our way. We had to get down from the carriage there and get into a palanquin. The white sands stretched for miles. In English they call it a riverbed, and it is a bed indeed. It is like the relinquished bed in the morning—it rises and falls in places whichever way the river current has turned on its side, or wherever it has applied some pressure—nobody has tried to carefully smooth down that dishevelled bed evenly, everything is still in disarray and scattered—at the other side of these vast sands a narrow little stream of clear water flows by faintly. In Kalidasa's
Meghdūt
we read a description of the separated loved one, the yaksha's wife, lying on her side like the lean outline of the new moon on the day of the Kṛshnapaksha fortnight in the east. Looking at this sliver of river at the end of the rains, another metaphor seems to come to mind for the pining woman….

The road from Cuttack to Puri is a very good one. It has been maintained with such care that you don't see the marks of carriage wheels upon it anywhere. The road is on a higher level, with both sides falling off in either direction. It is shaded by large trees. Mostly mango trees. At this time of year, most of the mango trees are in flower, and their smell makes the whole road distraught. An attractive, saffron-coloured, neat and clean road has made its way between the dense, long rows of trees—ploughed farmland descends from it on either side. Occasionally, you see a village surrounded by mango,
aśvattha
, banyan and coconut trees. There are no jungles here, or ponds full of water hyacinth or bamboo groves like in our Bengal—the whole country seems to have been tidied up as if for a Brahmin's feast, altogether there's quite an air of pilgrimage about it. We were supposed to stop midway at a
ḍāk bungalow
in a place called Sardaipur. On the way there we had to cross two rivers again. One was called Baluhonta, and the other, Bhargavi. There wasn't much river in them—from time to time just a little clear water shining in some places in the dry sand. On the bank, a number of covered bullock carts stood upon the
sand, sweet shops had been set up under roofs of round leaves—passengers ate on the roadside under the trees and inside small rows of huts, and teams of beggars began to whine in a variety of voices and languages the moment they saw new travellers and carriages or palanquins.

We reached the bungalow at Sardaipur in the evening. The bungalows here are pretty. Small, clean, hidden amidst trees and groves, secluded—one feels like spending a couple of days in these rest houses and really getting some rest. We all set out to look around after having our tea. The sun had just set at that time—in the evening twilight, the entire sky, vast fields, distant hills and a small broken-down temple on top of a hill appeared washed in a peaceful, beautiful exaltation. How do I say any more than this to you—you know how often I have written to you expressing the intense, deep love I have for this sort of evening scene. Not a single living creature was to be seen upon that long and silent road intersecting the rows of trees and the vast low-lying lands on either side; I wished that we too could be quiet and walk through the middle of this silence slowly, with our heads bent—but there was no let up in the conversation….

We woke up on Sunday morning to a cloudy sky. We had our bread and tea, finished our morning bath and got into the carriage. The
phaeton
's veil could be discarded because the sun was covered with clouds. The closer we got to Puri, the more travellers we saw on the road. Covered bullock carts were travelling together like a crowd of
misfortunes
. There were people sleeping, cooking, and gathered in groups by the road, under the trees, beside the ponds. Yet, until then we had barely come across any travellers. There are times when this long road absolutely fills up with people, and in the old days both sides of this road would be strewn with the bodies of travellers who had died of plague or starvation. Even today when it gets crowded a lot of people die of disease, starvation, and the travails of travel….

The trees on both sides of the road began to decrease the nearer we got to Puri. Occasionally there were temples, and inns and large ponds began to be appear more and more frequently. We could also see plenty of
sannyāsīs
, beggars and travellers. Some of these beggars followed our carriage for almost half an hour at a time, running continuously while invoking the blessings of Lord Jagannath upon us all, panting as they begged. They're almost all of them quite healthy, well-built and strong Brahmins. Puri is near the sea, so there aren't that many trees near it. There is a sort of large lake on the right side of the road, and on the other side, above the tops of the trees to the west, the temple's spire can be seen. From the incremental density in the rows of temples and the crowds of travellers on the roadside I realized we were very near Puri. We were to stay in the
circuit house
, which was outside the town. Suddenly at one point the moment we emerged from the groves of trees we saw a spread-out shore of sand and a line of deep blue sea. On the shore two or three scattered white houses, a
chapel
and some wells. There were paved footpaths in the sand and occasionally a bench to sit on. I can't even begin to express how much I like the sea at Puri; perhaps it might suffice if I tell you that a poor person like me is thinking about borrowing some money to build a bungalow here. I kept thinking of Kalidasa's
Meghdūt
when I saw this road in Orissa. In the
Meghdūt
we read about the village Dasharna fenced with
keẏā
trees, and here too there are many villages bordered with keẏā trees. All along the horizon one can see blue mountains at the edges and what in the
Meghdẏt
is called the
nagnadī
, or the mountainous streams, those that flow with water only in the rainy season, and are full of sand and gravel in the summer—there are many rivers of that sort over here. And on top of that our journey to Puri this time has been conducted almost entirely in cloudy weather, with the dark shadows of the clouds falling upon the large coconut groves, temples, and farmer's fields, and the lines of the mountains on
the horizon and the lines of the clouds had come together as one. And then tonight we are going to see the ruins of the Sun Temple at Konarak.