LAND OF CULTURES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 September 1941, Page 6

LAND OF CULTURES

INDIA’S INFINITE VARIETY. “India is a land of prodigal Variety,” said Sir Denys Bray in a recent address. “Majestic cultures far more ancient than our own, side by side with races whose cultures have sunk beyond recall; and here and there, in remote hills or jungle, primitive folk living in a world peopled with hobgoblins. Oriental grandeur side by side with an asceticism to which Europe can yield no parallel. Great wealth with poverty, alas, everywhere. Islam side by side with Hinduism. Islam, realist, individualist; a grand religious brotherhood, worshipping cne God only and the same God, yet split into sects, sometimes at loggerheads, but united when Islam seems threatened. Many-sided, idealist, introspective. Hinduism, with its rigid castes almost a negation of democracy, you might think; and yet, in the Hindu joint family presenting a very model of a benevolent communism. So diversified is India that it is hard to say anything about it to which India will not supply the contradiction. One thinks of India as under British administration; yet more than a third of India is under the rule of hereditary Indian princes: and almost all the rest is. or might today be. under provincial home-rule. One thinks of India as I the land of the Hindus; and so, in a sense, it is. for the Hindus have no other home, and the Hindus are an eighth—or is it a seventh? —of the human race: yet India contains millions upon millions who are not Hindus, about one hundred million Muslims among them. One thinks of it as agricultural. and so it is; yet it is among the eight leading industrial countries in the world. If its war effort goes on expanding, who can say how high it will rank after the war? One thinks of it as a land of intense heat: and so. heaven knows, it is. But where Will you find cold more intense than in its mountains? A land of monsoons and rains? Of course it is; it depends for its prosperity almost as much on the monsoon as Egypt on the Nile; yet there are vast stretches the monsdon. never reaches, nor any rain worth the name ever falls.”