Almost more amazing is that other great convention for the keeping up of European prestige—the convention of eating too much. Five meals a day—two breakfasts, luncheon, afternoon tea, and dinner—are standard throughout India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are theatres and dances to justify late supper. The Indian who eats at the most two meals a day, sometimes only one—too often none—is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority. In his autobiography Gandhi records his youthful lapses—after what frightful wrestlings with his conscience!—into meat eating. A fellow schoolboy led him into the sin. Meat, the tempter speciously argued, was the secret of English supremacy. The English were strong because they ate so much. If Indians would stuff themselves as imperially, they would be able to turn the English out of India.
Gandhi was struck; he listened, he allowed himself to be convinced. He ate—three or four times, at least. Perhaps that is why he came as near as he did to turning the English out of India. In any case, the story proves how deeply the Indians are impressed by our gastronomic prowess. Our prestige is bound up with over-eating. For the sake of the Empire the truly patriotic tourist will sacrifice his liver and his colon, will pave the way for future apoplexies and cancers of the intestine. I did my best while I was in India. But at the risk of undermining our prestige, of bringing down the whole imperial fabric in ruins about my ears, I used from time to time unobtrusively to skip a course. The spirit is willing, but the flesh, alas, is weak.
CALCUTTA
Indian industrial workers are recruited from the villages. Tradition is strong in the villages, and the rules of conduct are religiously and therefore ruthlessly enforced. When the pressure from outside is relaxed and they find themselves enjoying an unfamiliar freedom in the slums of the great cities, these industrialised countrymen tend to go, morally, to pieces.
Contact with strangers who play the game of life according to unfamiliar rules tends to weaken the compulsive force of commandments which, in the village, are unquestionably obeyed. For moralities, however excellent and efficient each may be when alone, are mutually destructive. They are like spiders—cannibals of their own kind. Brought into contact in the mind of a simple man, they will devour one another and leave him without any morality at all.
And while it weakens the countryman’s powers of resisting criminal temptations, city life at the same time multiplies the opportunities of profitable crime. In the village, where the actions of each individual are known to all the others, honesty, chastity, and temperance are the best policy. In the slums of a huge city, where every man is, so to speak, anonymous and solitary in the crowd, they may easily cease to be profitable. The honest, domestic, and temperate countryman is too often transformed by contact with the town into a thievish and fornicating drunkard.
The disturbing effects of a sudden change of environment on even the tolerably well-educated are always and everywhere apparent. On their first arrival in Paris young English and American men will behave as they would never dream of behaving at home. Young women, too, one is forced to add. It was ever so. St. Boniface writing to the then Archbishop of Canterbury complained that: “perpaucae sunt civitates in Longobardia vel in Francia aut in Gallia, in qua non sit adultera vel meretrix generis Anglorum, quod scandalum est et turpitudo totius ecclesiae vostrae.”
That was 745 a.d.; but the Saint might have been prophetically describing the state of things in 1926. The modern Italians tell an anecdote about a foreigner who asked a Florentine acquaintance why there were so few light and complaisant ladies to be found in his otherwise admirable city. The Florentine shrugged his shoulders. “Abbiamo le Americane,” he explained. The story is doubtless untrue; but it is significant that it should ever have been invented.
In India the importance to the individual of his community with its traditional religion, its traditional code of rules, is vastly greater than it is in the West. Deprived of these supports, the Indian finds it hard to stand. On him, therefore, the effect of a change of environment from the village to the distant city is generally much more serious than it would be to a Westerner.
The growth of industrialism in India has been accompanied by a corresponding break up of rural community life. Up to the present, however, industrialism has made but small progress in India, and village life as a whole is almost intact. But a beginning has been made and we may divine from Calcutta, Bombay, and Cawnpore what a largely industrialised India might become. The prophetic vision is not particularly inspiring. But material conditions may be improved and I like to think that the emancipation of a section of the population from the bonds of community life may prove in the end to be spiritually healthful.
Up till now, as any one who knows the slums of Indian industrial towns will tell you, emancipation has only been harmful. But in time, perhaps, the urbanised peasant will learn to accommodate himself to liberty. Freed from communal restraints, he may learn to develop his own personal resources in a manner hitherto unknown in rural India, where the human unit has always been the community, not the individual man or woman.
It is a pleasing hope and one to which, as a lover of freedom and of change, a hater of fixity and ready-made commandments, a believer in individuals, and an infidel wherever groups, communities and crowds are concerned, I cherish with a peculiar fondness. Hinduism and the Indian village system have been praised on the score that they have preserved the Indian people and the Indian character, have kept them unaltered and the same through centuries of physical assault and spiritual battery. To me the achievement seems more worthy of blame than of praise. Fixity is appalling. It is better, it seems to me, to be destroyed, to become something unrecognisably different, than to remain forever intact and the same, in spite of altering circumstance.
But these, no doubt, are jejune and romantic prejudices, born of false notions regarding the end and aim of human existence—of what is perhaps the first and fundamental false notion that human existence has any aim or end whatever, beyond its own prolongation and reproduction. To one who believes that man is here on earth to adventure, to know, to try all things, to advance (if only for the fun of advancing, of not standing still) towards some quite unattainable goal of perfection, the Indian scheme of existence will seem unsatisfactory in the extreme.
But if man (which may in reality be the case) is born only that he may live for a little, beget offspring, and die to make room for those he has begotten, then the Indian village community will seem the almost perfect form of social organisation. In an Indian village men can scratch up a living, breed, and die, without wasting a particle of their energy on vain experiments, on the pursuit of ideal will-o’-the-wisps, on the making of progress foredoomed by nature and man’s own destructiveness to lead nowhere. The only real flaw that I can discover in Indian village life is that it is profoundly boring. Change, incessant experiment, the hunt for knowledge are interesting. That is the best, perhaps the only, justification for these things.
That human beings will ever be able to dispense altogether with the Indian village or its equivalent seems doubtful. Man needs something outside himself to hang on to—a stable society, a system of conventions, a house, a piece of land, possessions, a family. Already in the most completely urbanised and industrialised parts of our world we can find migrant populations of men and women, who live in no place long enough to become attached to it or influenced by its spirit, who own no land, nor any tangible possessions—only the convenient symbol of money—who have few or no children, who believe in no organised religion.
These people are being compelled, by their mode of life, to impose an enormous strain on their own resources of mind and will, on personal relationships with their fellows—on love, marriage, friendship, family ties. They have nothing solid, outside themselves, on which they can lean. The strain they impose on them is often more than their spiritual resources and their personal relationships will bear. Hence a dissatisfaction, a shallowness of life, a profound uncertainty of purpose.
I have always felt a passion for personal freedom. It is a passion which the profession of writing has enabled me to gratify. A writer is his own master, works when and where he will, and is paid by a quite impersonal entity, the public, with whom it is unnecessary for him to have any direct dealings whatever.
Professionally free, I have taken care not to encumber myself with the shackles that tie a man down to one particular plot of ground; I own
