(A LETTER FROM NEW YORK TO THE AUTHOR'S OWN COUNTRYMEN)
When freedom is not an inner idea which imparts strength to our
activities and breadth to our creations, when it is merely a thing of
external circumstance, it is like an open space to one who is
blindfolded.
In my recent travels in the West I have felt that out there freedom as
an idea has become feeble and ineffectual. Consequently a spirit of
repression and coercion is fast spreading in the politics and social
relationships of the people.
In the age of monarchy the king lived surrounded by a miasma of
intrigue. At court there was an endless whispering of lies and
calumny, and much plotting and planning among the conspiring courtiers
to manipulate the king as the instrument of their own purposes.
In the present age intrigue plays a wider part, and affects the whole
country. The people are drugged with the hashish of false hopes and
urged to deeds of frightfulness by the goadings of manufactured
panics; their higher feelings are exploited by devious channels of
unctuous hypocrisy, their pockets picked under anaesthetics of
flattery, their very psychology affected by a conspiracy of money and
unscrupulous diplomacy.
In the old order the king was given to understand that he was the
freest individual in the world. A greater semblance of external
freedom, no doubt, he had than other individuals. But they built for
him a gorgeous prison of unreality.
The same thing is happening now with the people of the West. They are
flattered into believing that they are free, and they have the
sovereign power in their hands. But this power is robbed by hosts of
self-seekers, and the horse is captured and stabled because of his
gift of freedom over space. The mob-mind is allowed the enjoyment of
an apparent liberty, while its true freedom is curtailed on every
side. Its thoughts are fashioned according to the plans of organised
interest; in its choosing of ideas and forming of opinions it is
hindered either by some punitive force or by the constant insinuation
of untruths; it is made to dwell in an artificial world of hypnotic
phrases. In fact, the people have become the storehouse of a power
that attracts round it a swarm of adventurers who are secretly
investing its walls to exploit it for their own devices.
Thus it has become more and more evident to me that the ideal of
freedom has grown tenuous in the atmosphere of the West. The mentality
is that of a slave-owning community, with a mutilated multitude of men
tied to its commercial and political treadmill. It is the mentality of
mutual distrust and fear. The appalling scenes of inhumanity and
injustice, which are growing familiar to us, are the outcome of a
psychology that deals with terror. No cruelty can be uglier in its
ferocity than the cruelty of the coward. The people who have
sacrificed their souls to the passion of profit-making and the
drunkenness of power are constantly pursued by phantoms of panic and
suspicion, and therefore they are ruthless even where they are least
afraid of mischances. They become morally incapable of allowing
freedom to others, and in their eagerness to curry favour with the
powerful they not only connive at the injustice done by their own
partners in political gambling, but participate in it. A perpetual
anxiety for the protection of their gains at any cost strikes at the
love of freedom and justice, until at length they are ready to forgo
liberty for themselves and for others.
My experience in the West, where I have realised the immense power of
money and of organised propaganda,--working everywhere behind screens
of camouflage, creating an atmosphere of distrust, timidity, and
antipathy,--has impressed me deeply with the truth that real freedom
is of the mind and spirit; it can never come to us from outside. He
only has freedom who ideally loves freedom himself and is glad to
extend it to others. He who cares to have slaves must chain himself to
them; he who builds walls to create exclusion for others builds walls
across his own freedom; he who distrusts freedom in others loses his
moral right to it. Sooner or later he is lured into the meshes of
physical and moral servility.
Therefore I would urge my own countrymen to ask themselves if the
freedom to which they aspire is one of external conditions. Is it
merely a transferable commodity? Have they acquired a true love of
freedom? Have they faith in it? Are they ready to make space in their
society for the minds of their children to grow up in the ideal of
human dignity, unhindered by restrictions that are unjust and
irrational?
Have we not made elaborately permanent the walls of our social
compartments? We are tenaciously proud of their exclusiveness. We
boast that, in this world, no other society but our own has come to
finality in the classifying of its living members. Yet in our
political agitations we conveniently forget that any unnaturalness in
the relationship of governors and governed which humiliates us,
becomes an outrage when it is artificially fixed under the threat of
military persecution.
When India gave voice to immortal thoughts, in the time of fullest
vigour of vitality, her children had the fearless spirit of the
seekers of truth. The great epic of the soul of our people--the
_Mahabharata_--gives us a wonderful vision of an overflowing life,
full of the freedom of inquiry and experiment. When the age of the
Buddha came, humanity was stirred in our country to its uttermost
depth. The freedom of mind which it produced expressed itself in a
wealth of creation, spreading everywhere in its richness over the
continent of Asia. But with the ebb of life in India the spirit of
creation died away. It hardened into an age of inert construction. The
organic unity of a varied and elastic society gave way to a
conventional order which proved its artificial character by its
inexorable law of exclusion.
Life has its inequalities, I admit, but they are natural and are in
harmony with our vital functions. The head keeps its place apart from
the feet, not through some external arrangement or any conspiracy of
coercion. If the body is compelled to turn somersaults for an
indefinite period, the head never exchanges its relative function for
that of the feet. But have our social divisions the same
inevitableness of organic law? If we have the hardihood to say "yes"
to that question, then how can we blame an alien people for subjecting
us to a political order which they are tempted to believe eternal?
By squeezing human beings in the grip of an inelastic system and
forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and
growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making
them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design,
and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a
dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness
of soul under the immovable weight of a remote past. We have set up an
elaborate ceremonial of cage-worship, and plucked all the feathers
from the wings of the living spirit of our people. And for us,--with
our centuries of degradation and insult, with the amorphousness of our
national unity, with our helplessness before the attack of disasters
from without and our unreasoning self-obstructions from within,--the
punishment has been terrible. Our stupefaction has become so absolute
that we do not even realise that this persistent misfortune, dogging
our steps for ages, cannot be a mere accident of history, removable
only by another accident from outside.
Unless we have true faith in freedom, knowing it to be creative,
manfully taking all its risks, not only do we lose the right to claim
freedom in politics, but we also lack the power to maintain it with
all our strength. For that would be like assigning the service of God
to a confirmed atheist. And men, who contemptuously treat their own
brothers and sisters as eternal babies, never to be trusted in the
most trivial details of their personal life,--coercing them at every
step by the cruel threat of persecution into following a blind lane
leading to nowhere, driving a number of them into hypocrisy and into
moral inertia,--will fail over and over again to rise to the height of
their true and severe responsibility. They will be incapable of
holding a just freedom in politics, and of fighting in freedom's
cause.
The civilisation of the West has in it the spirit of the machine which
must move; and to that blind movement human lives are offered as fuel,
keeping up the steam-power. It represents the active aspect of inertia
which has the appearance of freedom, but not its truth, and therefore
gives rise to slavery both within its boundaries and outside. The
present civilisation of India has the constraining power of the mould.
It squeezes living man in the grip of rigid regulations, and its
repression of individual freedom makes it only too easy for men to be
forced into submission of all kinds and degrees. In both of these
traditions life is offered up to something which is not life; it is a
sacrifice, which has no God for its worship, and is therefore utterly
in vain. The West is continually producing mechanical power in excess
of its spiritual control, and India has produced a system of
mechanical control in excess of its vitality.