What gives the imperative its strength in cases such as this, I am at a loss to imagine. The August cuckoo takes wing for Africa at the command of a special migratory instinct. A desire born of his social instinct, to win the approval of his fellows, of some hypostasized “better self” or “personal god” makes a man act honourably in circumstances where it would be more profitable and more convenient to act dishonourably. But when a man reopens an envelope to see if it contains the letter he knows it does contain, when he gets out of bed on a cold night to make sure that he has switched off the light and bolted the doors which he clearly remembers turning out and bolting ten minutes before, no primary instinct can be evoked to account for the compulsive nature of the desire to do these irrational things. In such cases the categorical imperative seems to be morally senseless and psychologically unaccountable. It is as though a god were playing practical jokes.
SRINAGAR
The Kashmiris are proverbial throughout India for the filthiness of their habits. Wherever a choice is offered them between cleanliness and dirt, they will infallibly choose the latter. They have a genius for filthiness. We had daily opportunities of observing the manifestations of this peculiar genius. Our compound was provided with water from the city supply. From a tap at the end of the garden we could draw the pure filtered water of the reservoir among the mountains. The water from this tap, which was left running for hours at a time, was collected in a small brick-lined tank, on which the gardener drew for the watering of his flowers. And not the gardener only. We found that our servants had an almost irresistible desire to fetch our washing and drinking water from the same source. The fresh water ran sparkling from the tap; but their instinct was to take only the standing fluid in the uncovered tank. And to what uses the tank was put! Looking out in the morning, we could see our sweeper crouching on the brink to perform his ablutions. First he washed his hands, then his feet, then his face; after that he thoroughly rinsed his mouth, gargled and spat into the tank. Then he douched his nose. And when that was finished, he scooped some water in his hands and took a drink. A yard away was the tap. He preferred the tastier water of the tank.
The astonishing thing is that epidemics are not more frequent and severe than is actually the case. That they are not is due, I suppose, to the powerful disinfectant action of the sunlight. Perhaps also an almost daily and domestic familiarity with the germs of typhoid and cholera has bred among Kashmiri phagocytes a healthy contempt for their attacks, together with increased powers of resistance.
SRINAGAR
The Kashmiri pandit has a more than Spanish objection to manual labour. But, unlike the hidalgo who thought himself dishonoured by the exercise of any profession save that of arms, the pandit is ambitious of wielding only the pen. He may be abjectly poor (most people are abjectly poor in Kashmir); but he will do only a pandit’s work. Chauffeurs may get good wages, servants are clothed and fed; but the proud pandit had rather walk the streets begging than accept employments so derogatory to his Brahmin dignity.
There are many pandits in Kashmir. They are all educated, more or less, and all equally proud. The consequence is that, in Kashmir, you can hire a clerk for about half as much as you would have to pay your cook. And not in Kashmir only. It is the same throughout the whole of India. A circus recently visited Lahore. The management advertised for gate-keepers at fifteen rupees a month. Among the applicants, I was told, were upwards of forty graduates. Mysore, the best-governed of the Indian States, finds the same difficulty in disposing of the finished products of its higher education. After having gone to the trouble of taking their degrees, the graduates of its colleges demand, almost as a right (it is only natural), the work for which their educational attainments fit them. But the work does not exist.
That is the farcical tragedy of Indian education. The Universities produce a swarm of graduates, for whom there is nothing to do. The State can employ only a limited number of them and, outside the government service, there is almost no opening for a man with the ordinary general education of the West. The industrial and commercial activities, to which most of our young educated men devote themselves, hardly exist in India. There is no available liquid capital to start such industries on a large scale, and the average educated Indian lacks the enterprise and energy to begin in a small way on his own. His ambition is to step into some safe clerical job with no responsibilities, and a pension at the end of it. A “crammed” education in the humanities or in pure science hardly fits him for anything else. Unhappily, the number of safe clerkships with pensions attached is strictly limited. The Indian youth steps out of the University examination hall into a vacuum. The class of educated unemployed—the class most dangerous to an established government—steadily grows.
SRINAGAR
Educated Indians of the older generation have a great weakness for apophthegms, quotations, and cracker mottoes. They punctuate their conversation with an occasional “As the Persian poet so beautifully puts it”: then follows a string of incomprehensible syllables, with their appended translation, which generally embodies some such gem of human wisdom as “Honesty is the best policy,” or “The higher the art, the lower the morals,” or “My uncle’s house is on a hill, but I cannot eat this rotten cabbage.” Those whose education has been of a more occidental cast have Gray’s Elegy, the works of Sir Edwin Arnold, and the more sententious parts of Shakespeare at their finger-tips. But among the younger Indians the quotation habit seems to be dying out. Their wisdom is diffuse and unquotable. Their minds are stored with the nebulous débris of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and popular science booklets, not with heroic couplets.
It is the same with us in the West. Latin tags issue from the mouths only of the aged. The days when Virgil and Horace were bandied from one side of the House of Commons to the other are past. Latin with us, like Persian among the Indians, is a deader language than it was a century, even a generation, ago. Even the English classics are rarely quoted now. Young people trot out their Shakespeare less frequently than do their elders. The reason, I suppose, is this: we read so much, that we have lost the art of remembering. Indeed, most of what we read is nonsense, and not meant to be remembered. The man who remembered the social paragraphs in his morning paper would deserve to be sent to an asylum. So it comes about that we forget even that which is not worthy of oblivion. Moreover, to young people brought up in this queer provisional patchwork age of ours, and saturated with its spirit, it seems absurd to collect the rags of thought bequeathed by other and, they feel, utterly different ages. What is the use of knowing, in 1925, that “when lovely woman stoops to folly,” the best, the only thing she can do “is to die”? What is the good of asserting baldly that “the quality of mercy is not strained,” that “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world”?
These poetical statements have no meaning for us. When lovely woman stoops to folly, we do not think of death; we think of suppressed complexes and birth-control and the rights of the unmarried mother. About the quality of mercy we have our own contemporary ideas; how we regard it depends on whether we are followers of Gandhi on the one hand, or of Sorel, Lenin, and Mussolini on the other. It falleth as the gentle dew from heaven; it is twice blest. No doubt. But what is this to us, who have our peculiar problems about the rights and wrongs of violence to decide in our own way? And what meaning for us have those airy assertions about God? God, we psychologists know, is a sensation in
