Such arguments, of course, are never consciously put. But the training of Indians is such that they act as though in obedience to them. They have been taught that this present world is more or less illusory, that the aim of every man should be to break out of the cycle of recurrent birth, that the “soul” is everything and that the highest values are purely “spiritual.” Owing to their early inculcation, such beliefs have tended to become almost instinctive, even in the minds of those whose consciously formulated philosophy of life is of an entirely different character. It is obvious that people holding such beliefs will attach the smallest importance to the keeping up of appearances.
In these matters we Northerners behave like Behaviourists—as though the visible or audible expression of an idea were the idea itself, as though the symbol in some sort created the notion symbolised. Our religious rites, our acts of “natural piety” are solemnly performed, and with an almost military precision. The impressive service, we have found, actually manufactures God; the memorial ceremony creates and conserves our interest in the dead. Our royal pageantry is no less rich, no less consistently effective; for the pageant is the king. Our judges are wigged and magnificently robed. Absurd survival! But no; the majesty of the law consists in the wigs and the ermine. Then gentry keeps up appearances to the limit of its financial means and beyond. It is a folly, protests the believer in “spiritual” realities.
On the contrary, it is profound wisdom, based on the instinctive recognition of a great historical truth. History shows us that there were rites before there were dogmas, that there were conventions of behaviour before there was morality. Dogmas, indeed, have often been the children of rites—systems of thought called into existence to explain gestures. Morality is the theory of pre-existing social habits. (In the same way some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.) To sceptics desirous of believing, catholic directors of conscience prescribe the outward and visible practice of religion; practice, they know, brings forth faith; the formal appearance of religion creates its “spiritual” essence. It is the same with civilisation; men who practise the conventional ritual of civilisation become civilised. Appearing to be civilised, they really are so.
For civilisation is nothing but a series of conventions; being civilised is obeying those conventions, is keeping up the appearances of culture, prosperity, and good manners. The more widely and the more efficiently such appearances are kept up, the better the civilisation. There can never be a civilisation that ignores appearances and is wholly “spiritual.” A civilisation based on Quaker principles could not come into existence; Quakerism in all its forms is the product, by reaction, of a civilisation already highly developed. Before one can ignore appearances and conventions, there must be, it is obvious, conventions and appearances to ignore. The Simple Life is simple only in comparison with some existing life of complicated convention. If Quaker principles ceased to be the luxury of a refined few, and were accepted by the world at large, civilisation would soon cease to exist: freed from the necessity of keeping up the appearance of being civilised, the majority of human beings would rapidly become barbarous.
Admirers of India are unanimous in praising Hindu “spirituality.” I cannot agree with them. To my mind “spirituality” (ultimately, I suppose, the product of the climate) is the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. It is this preoccupation with “spiritual” realities, different from the actual historical realities of common life, that has kept millions upon millions of men and women content, through centuries, with a lot unworthy of human beings. A little less spirituality, and the Indians would now be free—free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. There would be less dirt and more food.
There would be fewer Maharajas with Rolls-Royces and more schools. The women would be out of their prisons, and there would be some kind of polite and conventional social life—one of those despised appearances of civilisation which are yet the very stuff and essence of civilised existence. At a safe distance and from the midst of a network of sanitary plumbing, Western observers, disgusted, not unjustifiably, with their own civilisation, express their admiration for the “spirituality” of the Indians, and for the immemorial contentment which is the fruit of it. Sometimes, such is their enthusiasm, this admiration actually survives a visit to India.
It is for its “materialism” that our Western civilisation is generally blamed. Wrongly, I think. For materialism—if materialism means a preoccupation with the actual world in which we live—is something wholly admirable. If Western civilisation is unsatisfactory, that is not because we are interested in the actual world; it is because the majority of us are interested in such an absurdly small part of it. Our world is wide, incredibly varied and more fantastic than any product of the imagination. And yet the lives of the vast majority of men and women among the Western peoples are narrow, monotonous, and dull. We are not materialistic enough; that is the trouble. We do not interest ourselves in a sufficiency of this marvellous world of ours. Travel is cheap and rapid; the immense accumulations of modern knowledge lie heaped up on every side.
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows how to read, has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, most of us prefer to spend our leisure and our surplus energies in elaborately, brainlessly, and expensively murdering time. Our lives are consequently barren and uninteresting and we are, in general, only too acutely conscious of the fact. The remedy is more materialism and not, as false prophets from the East assert, more “spirituality”—more interest in this world, not in the other. The Other World—the world of metaphysics and religion—can never possibly be as interesting as this world, and for an obvious reason. The Other World is an invention of the human fancy and shares the limitations of its creator. This world, on the other hand, the world of the materialists, is the fantastic and incredible invention of—well, not in any case of Mrs. Annie Besant.
CAWNPORE
Some of the speeches were in Hindi, some in English. When a man began in English, there would be a shout of “Hindi! Hindi!” from the patriots of Upper India. Those, on the other hand, who began in Hindi would find themselves interrupted by protests from the Tamil speaking delegates of the south, who called for English. Pandit Motilal Nehru, the leader of the Swaraj party, delivered his principal oration in Hindi. When it was over, an excited man jumped up and complained to the President and the Congress at large that he had spent upwards of a hundred rupees coming from somewhere beyond Madras to listen to his leader—a hundred rupees, and the leader had spoken in Hindi; he had not understood a single word. Later in the day, one of his compatriots mounted the rostrum and retaliated on the north by making a very long and totally incomprehensible speech in Tamil. The north was furious, naturally. These are some of the minor complexities of Indian politics.
CAWNPORE
The capitalist, the tax-collector, and the policeman have their places in every society, whatever its form of government. Men must work for their living, must pay for being governed and must obey the laws. To the eye of reason, the privilege of slaving for, paying taxes to and being put into prison by people of one’s own, rather than by people of another race may seem unimportant and hardly worth the trouble involved in ejecting alien policemen, tax-gatherers, and employers of labour. But men do not look at things with the eye of reason, and the Indians are men.
Whether the Indians are in a position to start governing themselves at once, whether they would do the job as well as the English, or worse, or better, I am not able to say. Nor, for that matter, is any one else. We all have our different theories about the matter; but in politics, as in science, one untested theory is as good, or as bad, as another. It is only experimentally that we can discover which out of a number of alternatives is the best hypothesis. Now the bewildering charm of politics lies in the fact that you cannot experimentally test the truth of alternative theories. At any given moment, only one choice can be made. For example, there were in 1916 certain people who
