The Mind of India

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 521, 17 June 1949, Page 18

The Mind of India

IN THE PATH OF MAHATMA GANDHI. By George Catlin. Macdonald. Price, 15/-. THE BHAGAVADGITA. Edited by S. ge mmm Allen and Unwin. Price, 0/6. N the first of these two ~books Dr. Catlin records his impressions of, and reflections upon, a rapid journey through India. The journey seems to have had some sort of official purpose, but its principal significance for Dr. Catlin ‘himself was that it gave him the opportunity to grapple more closely with some doubts about Gandhi’s philosophy of "non-violence" to which he was and is in a general way attracted. The book is not very well written; the author constantly drops into a somewhat puerile identification of himself with Goethe’s Faust, symbol of the Western spirit in pilgrimage; but some of the impressions and reflections are gMuch of what he has to say is about Sex, in dealing with which he betrays the soul of a bachelor. Sex, for him, is not an element in a personal ‘relationship, but a Force, and he cannot quite *make up his mind whether it is a good

one or a bad one. He is repelled by the popular Hindu worship of the processes of generation; and yet wonders if Gandhi did not perhaps go too far in regarding sexual relations, even within marriage, as essentially evil. The same blindness to the "dimension of the personal" vitiates his broader reflections on Hinduism, In th higher stages of this religion, the individual aims at some sort of absorption ) of himself into the World-Soul, and in Hindu society a man’s individual life is subordinated to his social function. Yet, Dr. Catlin feels, there is too much rather than two little individualism in Hinduism; it is too easy in India for a man to set up as a walking God. This circle too seems a vicious one. Whether there is too much or too little individualism in what Dr, Catlin describes-whether it is a case of being lost in one’s own self or in that of the Universe, or of Society-what is missing is any emphasis on relations between one self and another. All this, I think, has a bearing on Dr. Catlin’s main problem, that of pacifism. What is it that makes war such a ghastly thing? Is it that it is a Force (like Sex, as Dr. Catlin tends to

conceive it) to which it is beneath the dignity of a free spirit to yield himself? Or is it not rather that it tears up and destroys the material background, and nourishment, of the network of personal attachments in which the best of our life is found? And is it not only as a desperate measure to

preserve the same things that war has any justification? A merely ascetic pacifism is as empty as a soldierly heroism undertaken merely for heroism’s sake, or for glory. Here and there, indeed, Dr. Catlin refreshingly breaks through the Oriental web in which he has allowed himself to be enmeshed. Outstanding among such moments of illumination, are some in which he pencils some questions in the margin, as it were, of the Hindu classic, the Bhagavadgita. This old poem is in the form of a dialogue between a warrior prince, Arjuna,-who has suddenly conceived scruples about the slaughter in which he is about to engage, and’ his charioteer, who turns out to be the Godhead in disguise. The incarnate divinity’s first reply to Arjuna’s hesitation is, "Know thou that that by which all this is pervaded is indestructible. Of this immutable being, no one can bring about the destruction. .. He who thinks that this slays, and he who thinks that this is slain; both of them fail to perceive the _ truth; this one neither slays nor is ’ slain." The moral is that the warrior should perform the duties of his caste with an even mind. Dr. Catlin is distressed, as he very well might be, both at the sheer inconsequence of this argument, and at the moral indifference which would seem to be the proper conclusion from its premises. "One should

do the duty of one’s station, said the Gita. What was that; and why do it if all would be the same in the end?" HOSE who wish to study the Gita intensively may new do so in a new translation, with a full introduction and notes, by Sir Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, who is perhaps the most distinguished living Indian philosopher (he is certainly the best-known in the West). The fragment quoted above is, I think, sufficiently typical of the whole. After Arjuna’s first expression of his doubts, there are ‘many chapters of ethicotheological instruction, at the end of which the prince is satisfied, and the battle proceeds. The dialogue. repeatedly returns to the point that inner detachment is not incompatible with outward activity (the Yogi ahd the Commissar may well be one and the same person), and such detachment is set forth as the principal aim of the good man. I must confess that the Gospel of Non-attachment is one which awakens in me, not merely the hesitation which Dr. Catlin feels, but an unshakable antipathy. But it seems to me important that this feeling, by whomsoever it may be shared, should not be mixed with racialism: The "world-view" in question has had its Western as well as its Eastern advocates, and has been criticised as eloquently by Pandit Nehru as by any European writer, The former point is made abundantly clear by Professor Radhakrishnan’s notes, which provide a wealth of Western parallels both to features of the Gita which he admires, and to aspects of popular Hinduism which he is at one with most Europeans in disliking.

Arthur N.

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