One day, in a small village in Bengal, an ascetic woman from the
neighbourhood came to see me. She had the name "Sarva-khepi" given to
her by the village people, the meaning of which is "the woman who is
mad about all things." She fixed her star-like eyes upon my face and
startled me with the question, "When are you coming to meet me
underneath the trees?" Evidently she pitied me who lived (according to
her) prisoned behind walls, banished away from the great meeting-place
of the All, where she had her dwelling. Just at that moment my
gardener came with his basket, and when the woman understood that the
flowers in the vase on my table were going to be thrown away, to make
place for the fresh ones, she looked pained and said to me, "You are
always engaged reading and writing; you do not see." Then she took the
discarded flowers in her palms, kissed them and touched them with her
forehead, and reverently murmured to herself, "Beloved of my heart." I
felt that this woman, in her direct vision of the infinite personality
in the heart of all things, truly represented the spirit of India.
In the same village I came into touch with some Bauel singers. I had
known them by their names, occasionally seen them singing and begging
in the street, and so passed them by, vaguely classifying them in my
mind under the general name of Vairagis, or ascetics.
The time came when I had occasion to meet with some members of the
same body and talk to them about spiritual matters. The first Bauel
song, which I chanced to hear with any attention, profoundly stirred
my mind. Its words are so simple that it makes me hesitate to render
them in a foreign tongue, and set them forward for critical
observation. Besides, the best part of a song is missed when the tune
is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it
becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked.
The first line may be translated thus: "Where shall I meet him, the
Man of my Heart?" This phrase, "the Man of my Heart," is not peculiar
to this song, but is usual with the Bauel sect. It means that, for me,
the supreme truth of all existence is in the revelation of the
Infinite in my own humanity.
"The Man of my Heart," to the Bauel, is like a divine instrument
perfectly tuned. He gives expression to infinite truth in the music
of life. And the longing for the truth which is in us, which we have
not yet realised, breaks out in the following Bauel song:
Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?
He is lost to me and I seek him wandering from land to land.
I am listless for that moonrise of beauty,
which is to light my life,
which I long to see in the fulness of vision, in gladness of heart.
The name of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost
illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Bauel teacher found no
distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a
village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died
before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave
such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his
sect. And it is a sect, almost exclusively confined to that lower
floor of society, where the light of modern education hardly finds an
entrance, while wealth and respectability shun its utter indigence.
In the song I have translated above, the longing of the singer to
realise the infinite in his own personality is expressed. This has to
be done daily by its perfect expression in life, in love. For the
personal expression of life, in its perfection, is love; just as the
personal expression of truth in its perfection is beauty.
In the political life of the modern age the idea of democracy has
given mankind faith in the individual. It gives each man trust in his
own possibilities, and pride in his humanity. Something of the same
idea, we find, has been working in the popular mind of India, with
regard to its religious consciousness. Over and over again it tries to
assert, not only that God is _for_ each of us, but also that God is
_in_ each of us. These people have no special incarnations in their
simple theology, because they know that God is special to each
individual. They say that to be born a man is the greatest privilege
that can fall to a creature in all the world. They assert that gods in
Paradise envy human beings. Why? Because God's will, in giving his
love, finds its completeness in man's will returning that love.
Therefore Humanity is a necessary factor in the perfecting of the
divine truth. The Infinite, for its self-expression, comes down into
the manifoldness of the Finite; and the Finite, for its
self-realisation, must rise into the unity of the Infinite. Then only
is the Cycle of Truth complete.
The dignity of man, in his eternal right of Truth, finds expression in
the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters,
but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of
British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in
fact almost below zero:
My longing is to meet you in play of love, my Lover;
But this longing is not only mine, but also yours.
For your lips can have their smile, and your flute
its music, only in your delight in my love;
and therefore you are importunate, even as I am.
If the world were a mere expression of formative forces, then this
song would be pathetic in its presumption. But why is there beauty at
all in creation--the beauty whose only meaning is in a call that
claims disinterestedness as a response? The poet proudly says: "Your
flute could not have its music of beauty if your delight were not in
my love. Your power is great--and there I am not equal to you--but it
lies even in me to make you smile, and if you and I never meet, then
this play of love remains incomplete."
If this were not true, then it would be an utter humiliation to exist
at all in this world. If it were solely _our_ business to seek the
Lover, and _his_ to keep himself passively aloof in the infinity of
his glory, or actively masterful only in imposing his commands upon
us, then we should dare to defy him, and refuse to accept the
everlasting insult latent in the one-sided importunity of a slave. And
this is what the Bauel says--he who, in the world of men, goes about
singing for alms from door to door, with his one-stringed instrument
and long robe of patched-up rags on his back:
I stop and sit here on the road. Do not ask me to walk farther.
If your love can be complete without mine, let me turn back
from seeing you.
I have been travelling to seek you, my friend, for long;
Yet I refuse to beg a sight of you, if you do not feel my need.
I am blind with market dust and midday glare,
and so wait, my heart's lover, in hopes that your own love
will send you to find me out.
The poet is fully conscious that his value in the world's market is
pitifully small; that he is neither wealthy nor learned. Yet he has
his great compensation, for he has come close to his Lover's heart. In
Bengal the women bathing in the river often use their overturned water
jars to keep themselves floating when they swim, and the poet uses
this incident for his simile:
It is lucky that I am an empty vessel,
For when you swim, I keep floating by your side.
Your full vessels are left on the empty shore, they are for use;
But I am carried to the river in your arms, and I dance
to the rhythm of your heart-throbs and heaving of the waves.
The great distinguished people of the world do not know that these
beggars--deprived of education, honour, and wealth--can, in the pride
of their souls, look down upon them as the unfortunate ones, who are
left on the shore for their worldly uses, but whose life ever misses
the touch of the Lover's arms.
The feeling that man is not a mere casual visitor at the palace-gate
of the world, but the invited guest whose presence is needed to give
the royal banquet its sole meaning, is not confined to any particular
sect in India. Let me quote here some poems from a mediaeval poet of
Western India--Jnandas--whose works are nearly forgotten, and have
become scarce from the very exquisiteness of their excellence. In the
following poem he is addressing God's messenger, who comes to us in
the morning light of our childhood, in the dusk of our day's end, and
in the night's darkness:
Messenger, morning brought you, habited in gold.
After sunset, your song wore a tune of ascetic grey,
and then came night.
Your message was written in bright letters across the black.
Why is such splendour about you, to lure the heart of one
who is nothing?
This is the answer of the messenger:
Great is the festival hall where you are to be the only guest.
Therefore the letter to you is written from sky to sky,
And I, the proud servant, bring the invitation with all ceremony.
And thus the poet knows that the silent rows of stars carry God's own
invitation to the individual soul.
The same poet sings:
What hast thou come to beg from the beggar, O King of Kings?
My Kingdom is poor for want of him, my dear one, and I
wait for him in sorrow.
How long will you keep him waiting, O wretch,
who has waited for you for ages in silence and stillness?
Open your gate, and make this very moment fit for the union.
It is the song of man's pride in the value given to him by Supreme
Love and realised by his own love.
The Vaishnava religion, which has become the popular religion of
India, carries the same message: God's love finding its finality in
man's love. According to it, the lover, man, is the complement of the
Lover, God, in the internal love drama of existence; and God's call
is ever wafted in man's heart in the world-music, drawing him towards
the union. This idea has been expressed in rich elaboration of symbols
verging upon realism. But for these Bauels this idea is direct and
simple, full of the dignified beauty of truth, which shuns all tinsels
of ornament.
The Bauel poet, when asked why he had no sect mark on his forehead,
answered in his song that the true colour decoration appears on the
skin of the fruit when its inner core is filled with ripe, sweet
juice; but by artificially smearing it with colour from outside you do
not make it ripe. And he says of his Guru, his teacher, that he is
puzzled to find in which direction he must make salutation. For his
teacher is not one, but many, who, moving on, form a procession of
wayfarers.
Bauels have no temple or image for their worship, and this utter
simplicity is needful for men whose one subject is to realise the
innermost nearness of God. The Bauel poet expressly says that if we try
to approach God through the senses we miss him:
Bring him not into your house as the guest of your eyes;
but let him come at your heart's invitation.
Opening your doors to that which is seen only, is to lose it.
Yet, being a poet, he also knows that the objects of sense can reveal
their spiritual meaning only when they are not seen through mere
physical eyes:
Eyes can see only dust and earth,
But feel it with your heart, it is pure joy.
The flowers of delight blossom on all sides, in every form,
but where is your heart's thread to weave them in a garland?
These Bauels have a philosophy, which they call the philosophy of the
body; but they keep its secret; it is only for the initiated.
Evidently the underlying idea is that the individual's body is itself
the temple, in whose inner mystic shrine the Divine appears before the
soul, and the key to it has to be found from those who know. But as
the key is not for us outsiders, I leave it with the observation that
this mystic philosophy of the body is the outcome of the attempt to
get rid of all the outward shelters which are too costly for people
like themselves. But this human body of ours is made by God's own
hand, from his own love, and even if some men, in the pride of their
superiority, may despise it, God finds his joy in dwelling in others
of yet lower birth. It is a truth easier of discovery by these people
of humble origin than by men of proud estate.
The pride of the Bauel beggar is not in his worldly distinction, but in
the distinction that God himself has given to him. He feels himself
like a flute through which God's own breath of love has been breathed:
My heart is like a flute he has played on.
If ever it fall into other hands,--
let him fling it away.
My lover's flute is dear to him.
Therefore, if to-day alien breath have entered it and
sounded strange notes,
Let him break it to pieces and strew the dust with them.
So we find that this man also has his disgust of defilement. While the
ambitious world of wealth and power despises him, he in his turn
thinks that the world's touch desecrates him who has been made sacred
by the touch of his Lover. He does not envy us our life of ambition
and achievements, but he knows how precious his own life has been:
I am poured forth in living notes of joy and sorrow by your breath.
Morning and evening, in summer and in rains, I am fashioned to music.
Yet should I be wholly spent in some flight of song,
I shall not grieve, the tune is so precious to me.
Our joys and sorrows are contradictory when self separates them in
opposition. But for the heart in which self merges in God's love,
they lose their absoluteness. So the Bauel's prayer is to feel in all
situations--in danger, or pain, or sorrow--that he is in God's hands.
He solves the problem of emancipation from sufferings by accepting and
setting them in a higher context:
I am the boat, you are the sea, and also the boatman.
Though you never make the shore, though you let me sink,
why should I be foolish and afraid?
Is the reaching the shore a greater prize than losing myself
with you?
If you are only the haven, as they say, then what is the sea?
Let it surge and toss me on its waves, I shall be content.
I live in you, whatever and however you appear.
Save me or kill me as you wish, only never leave me in
others' hands.