A passage to India
ridge of its mountains, and then came Venice. As he landed on the
piazzetta a cup of beauty was lifted to his lips, and he drank with
a sense of disloyalty. The buildings of Venice, like the mountains
of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the right place, whereas
in poor India everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the
beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without
form, how can there be beauty? Form stammered here and there in a
mosque, became rigid through nervousness even, but oh these Italian
churches! San Giorgio standing on the island which could scarcely
have risen from the waves without it, the Salute holding the
entrance of a canal which, but for it, would not be the Grand
Canal! In the old undergraduate days he had wrapped himself up in
the many-coloured blanket of St. Mark’s, but something more precious
than mosaics and marbles was offered to him now: the harmony
between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the
civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable
form, with flesh and blood subsisting. Writing picture post-cards
to his Indian friends, he felt that all of them would miss the joys
he experienced now, the joys of form, and that this constituted a
serious barrier. They would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not
its shape, and though Venice was not Europe, it was part of the
Mediterranean harmony. The Mediterranean is the human norm. When
men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or
the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and
extraordinary; and the southern exit leads to the strangest
experience of all. Turning his back on it yet again, he took the
train northward, and tender romantic fancies that he thought were
dead for ever, flowered when he saw the buttercups and daisies of
June.
PART III: TEMPLE
CHAPTER XXXIII
Some hundreds of miles westward of the Marabar Hills, and two years
later in time, Professor Narayan Godbole stands in the presence of
God. God is not born yet—that will occur at midnight—but He has
also been born centuries ago, nor can He ever be born, because He
is the Lord of the Universe, who transcends human processes. He
is, was not, is not, was. He and Professor Godbole stood at opposite
ends of the same strip of carpet.
“Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram. . . .”
This corridor in the palace at Mau opened through other corridors
into a courtyard. It was of beautiful hard white stucco, but its
pillars and vaulting could scarcely be seen behind coloured rags,
iridescent balls, chandeliers of opaque pink glass, and murky
photographs framed crookedly. At the end was the small but famous
shrine of the dynastic cult, and the God to be born was largely a
silver image the size of a teaspoon. Hindus sat on either side of
the carpet where they could find room, or overflowed into the
adjoining corridors and the courtyard—Hindus, Hindus only,
mild-featured men, mostly villagers, for whom anything outside
their villages passed in a dream. They were the toiling ryot, whom
some call the real India. Mixed with them sat a few tradesmen out
of the little town, officials, courtiers, scions of the ruling
house. Schoolboys kept inefficient order. The assembly was in a
tender, happy state unknown to an English crowd, it seethed like
a beneficent potion. When the villagers broke cordon for a glimpse
of the silver image, a most beautiful and radiant expression came
into their faces, a beauty in which there was nothing personal,
for it caused them all to resemble one another during the moment
of its indwelling, and only when it was withdrawn did they revert
to individual clods. And so with the music. Music there was, but
from so many sources that the sum-total was untrammelled. The
braying banging crooning melted into a single mass which trailed
round the palace before joining the thunder. Rain fell at intervals
throughout the night.
It was the turn of Professor Godbole’s choir. As Minister of
Education, he gained this special honour. When the previous group
of singers dispersed into the crowd, he pressed forward from the
back, already in full voice, that the chain of sacred sounds might
be uninterrupted. He was barefoot and in white, he wore a pale blue
turban; his gold pince-nez had caught in a jasmine garland, and
lay sideways down his nose. He and the six colleagues who supported
him clashed their cymbals, hit small drums, droned upon a portable
harmonium, and sang:
“Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram, Tukaram,
Thou art my father and mother and everybody.
Tukaram, Tukaram. . . .”
They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint;
they did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically
correct; this approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call
it), a frustration of reason and form. Where was the God Himself,
in whose honour the congregation had gathered? Indistinguishable
in the jumble of His own altar, huddled out of sight amid images
of inferior descent, smothered under rose-leaves, overhung by
oleographs, outblazed by golden tablets representing the Rajah’s
ancestors, and entirely obscured, when the wind blew, by the
tattered foliage of a banana. Hundreds of electric lights had been
lit in His honour (worked by an engine whose thumps destroyed the
rhythm of the hymn). Yet His face could not be seen. Hundreds of
His silver dishes were piled around Him with the minimum of effect.
The inscriptions which the poets of the State had composed were
hung where they could not be read, or had twitched their drawing-pins
out of the stucco, and one of them (composed in English to indicate
His universality) consisted, by an unfortunate slip of the
draughtsman, of the words, “God si Love.”
God si Love. Is this the first message of India?
“Tukaram, Tukaram . . .,”
continued the choir, reinforced by a squabble behind the purdah
curtain, where two mothers tried to push their children at the same
moment to the front. A little girl’s leg shot out like an eel. In
the courtyard, drenched by the rain, the small Europeanized band
stumbled off into a waltz. “Nights of Gladness” they were playing.
The singers were not perturbed by this rival, they lived beyond
competition. It was long before the tiny fragment of Professor
Godbole that attended to outside things decided that his pince-nez
was in trouble, and that until it was adjusted he could not choose
a new hymn. He laid down one cymbal, with the other he clashed the
air, with his free hand he fumbled at the flowers round his neck.
A colleague assisted him. Singing into one another’s grey
moustaches, they disentangled the chain from the tinsel into which
it had sunk. Godbole consulted the music-book, said a word to the
drummer, who broke rhythm, made a thick little blur of sound, and
produced a new rhythm. This was more exciting, the inner images it
evoked more definite, and the singers’ expressions became fatuous
and languid. They loved all men, the whole universe, and scraps of
their past, tiny splinters of detail, emerged for a moment to melt
into the universal warmth. Thus Godbole, though she was not
important to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore
days. Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated
state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the
throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her
by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be
found. Completeness, not reconstruction. His senses grew thinner,
he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone. He
loved the wasp equally, he impelled it likewise, he was imitating
God. And the stone where the wasp clung—could he . . . no, he could
not, he had been wrong to attempt the stone, logic and conscious
effort had seduced, he came back to the strip of red carpet and
discovered that he was dancing upon it. Up and down, a third of
the way to the altar and back again, clashing his cymbals, his
little legs twinkling, his companions dancing with him and each
other. Noise, noise, the Europeanized band louder, incense on the
altar, sweat, the blaze of lights, wind in the bananas, noise,
thunder, eleven-fifty by his wrist-watch, seen as he threw up his
hands and detached the tiny reverberation that was his soul. Louder
shouts in the crowd. He danced on. The boys and men who were
squatting in the aisles were lifted forcibly and dropped without
changing their shapes into the laps of their neighbours. Down the
path thus cleared advanced a litter. It was the aged ruler of the
state, brought against the advice of his physicians to witness the
Birth ceremony.
No one greeted the Rajah, nor did he wish it; this was no moment
for human glory. Nor could the litter be set down, lest it defiled
the temple by becoming a throne. He was lifted out of it while its
feet remained in air, and deposited on the carpet close to the
altar, his immense beard was straightened, his legs tucked under
him, a paper containing red powder was placed in his hand. There
he sat, leaning against a pillar, exhausted with illness, his eyes
magnified by many unshed tears.
He had not to wait long. In a land where all else was unpunctual,
the hour of the Birth was chronometrically observed. Three minutes
before it was due, a Brahman brought forth a model of the village
of Gokul (the Bethlehem in that nebulous story) and placed it in
front of the altar. The model was on a wooden tray about a yard
square; it was of clay, and was gaily blue and white with streamers
and paint. Here, upon a chair too small for him and with a head
too large, sat King Kansa, who is Herod, directing the murder of
some Innocents, and in a corner, similarly proportioned, stood the
father and mother of the Lord, warned to depart in a dream. The
model was not holy, but more than a decoration, for it diverted
men from the actual image of the God, and increased their sacred
bewilderment. Some of the villagers thought the Birth had occurred,
saying with truth that the Lord must have been born, or they could
not see Him. But the clock struck midnight, and simultaneously the
rending note of the conch broke forth, followed by the trumpeting
of elephants; all who had packets of powder threw them at the
altar, and in the rosy dust and incense, and clanging and shouts,
Infinite Love took upon itself the form of Shri Krishna, and saved
the world. All sorrow was annihilated, not only for Indians, but
for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars; all became
joy, all laughter; there had never been disease nor doubt,
misunderstanding, cruelty, fear. Some jumped in the air, others
flung themselves prone and embraced the bare feet of the universal
lover; the women behind the purdah slapped and shrieked; the little
girl slipped out and danced by herself, her black pigtails flying.
Not an orgy of the body; the tradition of that shrine forbade it.
But the human spirit had tried by a desperate contortion to ravish
the unknown, flinging down science and history in the struggle,
yes, beauty herself. Did it succeed? Books written afterwards say
“Yes.” But how, if there is such an event, can it be remembered
afterwards? How can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not
only from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself
cannot retain them. He may think, if he chooses, that he has been
with God, but as soon as he thinks it, it becomes history, and
falls under the rules of time.