Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

not changed remarked, 'It's a little late. I might be changing clothes for nothing. He might send me out.'

The thought that all my efforts to get them to work might be brought to naught by the asst. telling him it was too late and perhaps sending all the drivers home and shutting the mine down, angered me, and I said, 'You change clothes and go to work. If he does n't let you work, then come to me, and there 'll be a hell of a row around this mine this morning.' Apparently one bonehead a day is the limit of the asst., because there was no interference and we went to work.

As we walked over to the pit-head, the mine manager reached the mine. We went over to the office with him. He asked, 'What's the matter?'

"Well,' I replied, 'we got 'em down.' "Who?' he said: 'the drivers? I thought they said they was n't going to strike till Monday.'

I explained to him the telegram that had been received and the difficulty we had had in persuading the men, and also the injudicious conduct of the asst. In his defense of the asst., he said, 'Well, I guess he wanted them to go to work.' I asked him if in his experience as a mine manager he had ever seen a case where the mine manager's appearance on the scene, trying to persuade men who were determined to wildcat

not to do so, acted on them otherwise than as waving a red flag before a bull. I told him I had always noticed that shrewd mine-managers stayed in the office out of sight when trouble of this kind occurred, leaving it to the Pit Committee, and if they failed, reporting it to the operators' association, who in turn took the matter up with higher officials of the miners' organization.

He eventually agreed that perhaps that was the right policy to pursue. He seemed vexed, however, and said, 'It's about time we quit coddling these drivers. If they're going to strike why in the hell don't they strike and be done with it?'

I bristled up and told him that we had done what we considered our duty under the contract, in trying to keep the mine in operation, but if he said so we would cease further efforts and let the thing take its own course. He saw the trap, however, and backed out, so I told him that we would keep them at work, but expected him to coöperate with us and not complain if we delayed starting-time in the morning a few minutes. It would be entirely up to him, however, we informed him; and if the mine were shut down by him because of the delay in getting the men started, that, of course, would be presented in the evidence to the Joint Board, if the case got that far.

[ocr errors]

INDIAN VOICES1

BY DHAN GOPAL MUKERJI

CALCUTTA offended me. As a town it was bad enough fifteen years ago. Now, with endless electric car-lines, with numberless taxicabs as well as private automobiles, the second largest city of the British Empire was unendurable beyond description. Business was the genesis of this town when it was built and fortified in the last lap of the seventeenth century; and it will be business, I hope, that will kill it some day. The unbearable Gothic and French-Renaissance architecture of the offices of the Government produced an excruciating effect on me, particularly when they were reinforced by European houses modeled after the horrible mediocre middle-class homes of the 70's in Britain and Germany. A thousand years from now, when visitors marvel at the beauteous architecture of the Mogul India, they will marvel equally at the ugliness of British India. If there is anything more exotically ugly and unnatural than those Gothic horrors in tropical Calcutta, I should like to be warned, that I may forever avoid seeing it. I might advise a Western tourist not to judge India by Calcutta, for it would be nothing short of judging salvation by suicide. If you can imagine Brixton, East Ealing, Bayswater, all on the shores of the Ganges, then you can imagine the unimaginable-Calcutta.

1 An earlier chapter of Mr. Mukerji's experiences appeared in the June Atlantic under the title 'My Brother's Face.' - THE EDITOR VOL. 134- NO. 1

I

It has a long river-front covered with jute mills owned by Scotchmen, Americans, Greeks, Jews, and Englishmen. And, where there are bathing-ghats for Hindus, the steps down are of cast iron made in Sheffield. Where there are no ghats nor factories there are steamboat landing-stations as ugly as any the world over. Added to this a horrible steam freight-train line runs along the full length of the town up and down the river to carry jute from factory to warehouse and back again. The only relief from the reign of ugliness is a few Indian temples and the Maidan.

The Maidan is a large park with gardens, cricket fields and polo grounds, the centre of which is occupied by the garrison called Fort William. Beautiful gray macadam and redgravel roads serpentine their way through the thick tropical verdure of this park which is, however, being encroached upon rapidly by statues and public buildings whose untropical character I have already described. Even in the Maidan, if one has any hope left for Beauty, it is well crushed by the military band that plays indifferent Western music there with great gusto. Think of bits from Meyerbeer, Verdi, Victor Herbert, and Tchaikowsky's tenth symphony — all groaning, booming, and bombarding your hearing, while the sunlight falls on you like a thunderbolt of heat, and the breeze is oppressive with a thousand whisperings of the forest lands

where tigers creep, taut as a rope, stretched to the full, ready to leap on bisons twice their size, and the flute of the savage calls his beloved to the tryst through the thickly fragrant night.

Where thousands of elephants used to walk through jungle lands, now honk and pass auto-taxis intent on speed. and profit. Speed and profit - yes; that is the breath and pulse-beat of modern Calcutta.

Yet it is my own town, and I love it. The language of Bengal is spoken there as nowhere else. Every tongue has the style of Tagore's prose pellucid, haunting, wicked. The first Bengali sentence that Calcutta spoke to me on my return was, 'Come, amuse thyself with kind words; the day is young, and we all know life is brief as a sparrow's hop.'

The speech of men is the ring of gold in which may shine the precious stone of Thought; and there is no speech so attractive as Bengali, unless it be Spanish 'a language of caprice and orderliness.' Tears came to my eyes when I heard the railway porter say, "The parched tongue needs a cool drink or the voice of the beloved to slake its thirst.'

Of course we Bengalis are tremendous talkers. But what a picturesque speech we utter! The best poet of India as well as the best scientist is a Bengali, and Jagadish Bose is as much of a poet (read his inaugural address before his institute) as Tagore is a scientist.

So when I am accused of being a talkative Bengali I am complimented, and I say to myself, 'If you had such a tongue as mine you too would talk.'

II

In a tumultuous state of mind horrified at Calcutta's ugliness, and thrilled at the Bengali speech - I

reached our home. It was all there, yet all seemed so empty without my mother to welcome me. My widowed sister and her children and my brother, all put together, could not fill the place of my mother. They too felt as I did, and the home-coming, though sweet, was infinitely sad. Everything reminded me of her the picture of Vishnu and Shiva on the white polished Iwalls which had been hers. The bare floors, immaculate and red-tiled as before, the tree in the front yard and the empty backyard — each thing was familiarity itself, yet none spoke out its heart to me. As my brother and sister said: "The goddess is gone, only the devotees are left.'

contrived arches

Then I went to look at our family temple. How beautiful it was and how old! It had been ours for many, many centuries. I was told that it had hardly any beams and rafters and that all its three stories were held up by cunningly contrived arches - the product of an art and a science that are no more within the command of the master builders. It was strange to think that here I might have remained to carry on the tradition of my family in peace, instead of leaving all in exchange for the strange turbulent years in a foreign land. But something had always driven me from the settled path, some urge toward an unknown goal, where should await me "The ThousandFaced One' at last.

I must not delude the reader into believing that the moment of reunion was a perfectly happy one for our family. It took nearly two days for us to overcome strange obstacles of thought and to make the necessary adjustment to them. I had to unlearn many things. For an example: in America young and old smoke together, but in India one does not smoke in the presence of one's elders, whether relatives or friends. Since I am the

youngest I have no end of elders in my family and the result was that I could hardly light a cigarette and smoke for a few seconds without hearing footsteps which were the signal for me to fling the cigarette at once from the window, and sit still like a nice boy. It was agonizing to see a good cigarette smoking itself out of existence just outside one's own window. And I took the only way out of that difficulty -I gave up smoking. The cigarette episode proved to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that, in my family, we have an extraordinarily large number of elderly relations.

I must say also that beside unlearning many things I was forced to learn a great deal. The younger members of the family, mostly my nephews and nieces, were very forward and assertive. I said to myself, 'They have no manners at all. Why, when we were their age-eighteen or twenty we were seen, never heard! The young are a horrible spectacle nowadays, the world over. No doubt they have their excellence, but that does not excuse their demerits. Imagine young people thirty years ago arguing to prove one of their seniors wrong! We never did such rude things.' My nephews and nieces not only contradicted me, but told me to my face that I was not good but goody-good! I was so enraged that I could have murdered the lot of them, and felt no regret.

Every dog must have his day, however, even those modern youngsters. My niece told me that she thought men ought to attempt to 'live up' to the women. (Yes, she spoke English!) As if they had done anything else these centuries! She added insult to injury by saying that a man like me, who relaxes too much at home, will not be tolerated within another twenty years. I was advised to keep up to the

mark at home as I did abroad. Then another niece, an orthodox soul, enjoined upon me two baths and three meditation hours a day. She also thought my relations with God were too loose. Now I ask the traveled reader if this does not sound like his own home-coming. I have since then decided to live on steamships and Pullman trains. Never shall I willingly go where the young are shaping the future nearer to their heart's desire.

I have a nephew, a lad of twenty or thereabouts. He and his friends opened my eyes to another aspect of modern Indian life. They are all university men and not a single one of them has any respect for the Western mind. I remember that when I was a boy of their age I went to the Occident to learn at its feet. The young college men of India, to-day, would rather sit on the head of the West. I had one unforgettable afternoon with these youngsters. There were four of us myself, two students of physics, and one medical student who was very fair, with a round face, pug nose, and extremely strong ungracious chin. The other two were of a professional and retiring type, as dark as ripe olives, and with exquisite features, but they both lacked strength of jaw, and looked very much alike.

The young doctor began the conversation by saying: 'Civilization comes from the East as does the sun. The West has nothing to teach us.'

'But is not medicine Western?' I asked. 'Hippocrates, Harvey, Osler-' He said, 'But what about our Hindu medicine, Ayurveda (translated, 'how to lengthen life,' which is our word for medicine)? And chemistry? Has the East known less of these than the West? Has it not contributed just as many valuable truths? Even now we find that a majority of the people of India lives by the aid of old Hindu

medicine, and few ever get assistance from the West. You forget, sir. I am afraid you take the sordid European's evil interpretation of our history and sciences. There are thirty Indians who go to Hindu practitioners to one who receives aid from European doctors. In the face of that—'

'But you must admit that some things are lacking to our science,' I ventured meekly.

'Whatever it lacks in one way it can supply in another.' He was firm. "The West may teach us something of surgery, but we can teach it the cure of leprosy. Does it not rather balance the account?' questioned this aggressive young hopeful.

'Surely in physics and chemistry Westerners teach us a lot.' I turned to the two physicists, but I am afraid I had mistaken their meekness.

'What can those aggressive barbarians teach us more than we ourselves have taught them?' answered

one.

'What did we teach them, by the way, for they think of us as savages?' I remarked.

A flood of eloquence was the reward of my retort. 'Did not we Hindus teach the Arabs algebra and the decimal system of notation and numerals, and did not the Arabs give these to the Western savages? Did not the Chaldeans, another Eastern people, teach them astronomy? Did not China teach them how to make gunpowder and the mariner's compass? Did not Persia invent paper, the very thing on which printing а Chinese invention depends?'

The second physicist added to the list: 'Did not India teach Pythagoras the scales of music? The very word, Pythagoras, is Sanskrit - Father, Teacher. India has her own geometry, her own mathematics, her own art, science, and philology. Should we bow

to the Western savage simply because he has the lung power to shout that he is superior? He has invented poison gas, liquid fire, and peace proclamations; then he comes to us, Bible in one hand and hand grenades in the other. Who is savage - he or we? They from the West send us whiskey with machine guns and we offer them Gandhism. Who is more spiritual, who more civilized, they or we?'

Here the medical student put the finishing touch to the afternoon's argument: 'Until the eighteenth century, the East and West were abreast of each other. If one were more advanced than the other, surely it was the East. Since the Crusades and before the eighteenth century, the Western swashbucklers came to us for gold, silk, Damascene work, and the real arts of civilization. They kept on coming as beggars to the gate of a royal palace. Till the eighteenth century they were our debtors. Then they stole a march on us when they superseded man and animal-power by steam and electricity. During all these thousands of years civilization was the gift of the East to the West. Only a hundred out of thousands of years is European; their civilization began with the steam engine and will end with aerial navigation. In a hundred more years, they are finished - and their souls dead. I grant you that the nineteenth century is theirs, but not the other hundreds of years before that, when they took and we gave!'

[ocr errors]

'But that hundred years is something, is n't it?' I asked.

'Give us time. Let us have the equivalent of those hundred years, with all their material facilities, and I can wager that our Asiatic genius and concentration will in the end give them a better science than their own. We shall beat them in their own game. Bose, Sah, Dutta, Ghose,

« ElőzőTovább »