I
It is not always a profound interest in man that carries travellers
nowadays to distant lands. More often it is the facility for rapid
movement. For lack of time and for the sake of convenience we
generalise and crush our human facts into the packages within the
steel trunks that hold our travellers' reports.
Our knowledge of our own countrymen and our feelings about them have
slowly and unconsciously grown out of innumerable facts which are full
of contradictions and subject to incessant change. They have the
elusive mystery and fluidity of life. We cannot define to ourselves
what we are as a whole, because we know too much; because our
knowledge is more than knowledge. It is an immediate consciousness of
personality, any evaluation of which carries some emotion, joy or
sorrow, shame or exaltation. But in a foreign land we try to find our
compensation for the meagreness of our data by the compactness of the
generalisation which our imperfect sympathy itself helps us to form.
When a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes
the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his
rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his
personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for
crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across
some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons as he goes from
every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.
Our mind has faculties which are universal, but its habits are
insular. There are men who become impatient and angry at the least
discomfort when their habits are incommoded. In their idea of the next
world they probably conjure up the ghosts of their slippers and
dressing-gowns, and expect the latchkey that opens their lodging-house
door on earth to fit their front door in the other world. As
travellers they are a failure; for they have grown too accustomed to
their mental easy-chairs, and in their intellectual nature love home
comforts, which are of local make, more than the realities of life,
which, like earth itself, are full of ups and downs, yet are one in
their rounded completeness.
The modern age has brought the geography of the earth near to us, but
made it difficult for us to come into touch with man. We go to strange
lands and observe; we do not live there. We hardly meet men: but only
specimens of knowledge. We are in haste to seek for general types and
overlook individuals.
When we fall into the habit of neglecting to use the understanding
that comes of sympathy in our travels, our knowledge of foreign people
grows insensitive, and therefore easily becomes both unjust and cruel
in its character, and also selfish and contemptuous in its
application. Such has, too often, been the case with regard to the
meeting of Western people in our days with others for whom they do not
recognise any obligation of kinship.
It has been admitted that the dealings between different races of men
are not merely between individuals; that our mutual understanding is
either aided, or else obstructed, by the general emanations forming
the social atmosphere. These emanations are our collective ideas and
collective feelings, generated according to special historical
circumstances.
For instance, the caste-idea is a collective idea in India. When we
approach an Indian who is under the influence of this collective idea,
he is no longer a pure individual with his conscience fully awake to
the judging of the value of a human being. He is more or less a
passive medium for giving expression to the sentiment of a whole
community.
It is evident that the caste-idea is not creative; it is merely
institutional. It adjusts human beings according to some mechanical
arrangement. It emphasises the negative side of the individual--his
separateness. It hurts the complete truth in man.
In the West, also, the people have a certain collective idea that
obscures their humanity. Let me try to explain what I feel about it.