§ 1
I do not think I could now arrange into a consecutive history my
travellings, my goings and returnings in my wandering effort to see and
comprehend the world. And certainly even if I could arrange my facts I
should still be at a loss to tell of the growth of ideas that is so much
more important than any facts, to trace the increasing light to its
innumerable sources, to a chink here, to a glowing reflection there, to
a leap of burning light from some long inert darkness close at hand. But
steadily the light grew, and this vast world of man, in which our world,
little son, is the world of a limited class in a small island, began to
take on definite forms, to betray broad universal movements; what seemed
at first chaotic, a drift and tangle of passions, traditions, foolish
ideas, blundering hostilities, careless tolerances, became confusedly
systematic, showed something persistent and generalized at work among
its multitudinous perplexity.
I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly the main
generalizations that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the
simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and
sounds and--smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive
olfactory palette as much as its palette of colors--that rained daily
and nightly upon my mind.
Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden,
the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it
in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory
of countless worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European
displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and
temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun,
swarming with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also
swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly
splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here
these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at
this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid
flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires
streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at
Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering mosque of
Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated
figures fall into meditation. And other memories recur and struggle with
one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and
houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to
twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze in Osaka and Yokohama
and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with
a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese
temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls
of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat pagoda-guarded gates. How those
great outlines lowered at me in the twilight, full of fresh memories and
grim anticipations of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here
recalling it--feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall
that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen!
going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at
last it seems to me that there emerges--something understandable.