A Barbarian in Asia

SOUTHERN INDIA

The Southern Hindu, belonging to the Dravidian race, small, lively, quick-tempered, no longer corresponds in any way to the European conception of the Hindu.

As soon as you reach the South, the skin gets darker, and you are dealing with almost black people. Dressed accordingly: pink and red disappear, and dark green and violet take their place.

The big â, ô, and ê of the Northern languages disappear; everything moistens into consonants in Malayan, or is buttressed by double consonants, in Tamil (Tamil is a more ancient language than Sanscrit, and has nothing in common with the latter). The people here are no longer ‘important.’ They look at you with an expression that is of no consequence. No hypnotism at all. They are not ruminants. If they have two minutes to kill, they do not squat down. You see some of them standing up or even walking, fast.

In the temples, the gods form a façade, their gopurams are bazaars for gods, demons and giants.

All the gods are a bit devilish. You throw yourself at full length on the ground for them, and rather quickly (quite unceremoniously). In front of Ganescha, you give yourself two small blows with the fist near the ear. They have a preference for the gods of lesser divinity, for example, the goddess of smallpox. Religion loses its beauty, its peace. It has ceased to have a fine sound. They are multi-theists.

Often, at the same time, they are converted to the Catholic faith (the only part of India where converts are numerous).

The English look on them as children.

These are the natives of India, the real ones. They occupied the whole of India in the past. They were colonized by the Northern Hindus.

It is hard to say what they might have been without the influence of the conquerors and of their religion, in which they are completely wrapped up as they would have been wrapped up in any other religion.

They were people who particularly liked the magic¹ of words.

At one period alone (that of Sangham) they mention 192 poets of merit: fifty-seven farmers, thirty-six women, twenty-nine Brahmins, seventeen mountaineers, thirteen foresters, seven merchants, thirteen Pandyas kings, etc., a potter and a fisherman.

It is impossible to think of India without being a Communist. The social question is perhaps only of secondary importance. But the degradation, the lack of human dignity which results from a society with two different standards is such that the whole man is corrupted by it in all that he is, says and does, and he who is honored (the Brahmins and the rajahs, and perhaps all of us) even more than he who is held in contempt.

However, there is not another country in the world where, to ‘get into conversation’ with you — in a train, no matter where — the native speaks to you… about Jesus Christ.

The Hindu is quite unable to imagine that a man could be indifferent to religion.

Most of them sincerely love Jesus Christ, regret that he was not incarnated among them, regret that he was not incarnated a second and a third time, would like to have news of him.

Nevertheless, even a European atheist is often hurt by the familiarity with which they converse about Jesus Christ.

My Bengali companion said pleasantly of the women in the South: ‘A thousand coming, not one pretty.’ He should have said: Ten thousand coming, not one pretty. (Finally, I saw one.)

As for the men, stubborn heretic faces, some with profiles and eyes like lizards (particularly when ill, they resemble lizards). Nose, eyes, mouth bunched together as if the result of a curse or of a cataclysm. Low foreheads (a frontal ribbon, one might say), and the skull with its bushy hair (but he is shaved to the top of his head) make his resemblance to a monkey more striking.

A lot of Bourbon heads too, but reduced, feverish, the power lost, and the hair worn in a bun.

Their curiosity is greater than that of the Northern Hindus, which is already so great. If one of them gets hold of the slightest bit of information about you, that you are thirty-two years old, for example, he immediately informs the entire neighborhood, all the travelers at the station, all passers-by in the city. Not only that, but from a distance he is questioned. And he replies triumphantly: ‘He is thirty-two years old. He has come to visit India.’ And the amazing news spreads like wildfire.

They look at you as one looks at a new arrival at the zoo, a bison, an ostrich, or a snake. India is a zoological garden where the natives get a chance to see, from time to time, specimens from elsewhere.

If a European is questioned on his return from India, he does not hesitate; he replies: ‘I have seen Madras, I have seen this, I have seen that.’ But this is not so; he has been seen, much more seen than he has seen.

When the Hindu talks to you, it is nose to nose. He takes the breath from your mouth. He can never get near enough. His big Jupiter-like head and his disinterested eyes are wedged between the horizon and yourself.

So, holding you down, he unrolls his phrases, he declaims. All this in order to say perfectly insignificant things. But he is driven by a strange force to make a speech, preach a sermon, and a piece of information at once takes on the importance of a matter of universal interest.

The Southern Hindus, in the villages, when you stand still a moment, surround you ten deep, enveloping you with their eyes, so close that if you cough you injure two or three of them.

If you speak, they somehow manage to get closer. The Northern Hindu declaims, the Southern Hindu roars.

Not only is his singing (that of the Dravidian populations in the South) high-pitched, but also his speech. With regard to French, if he speaks it, he has the firm-set notion that it is a language of the head, and only by extreme force and in the throes of anguish can you hope to extract more or less of it from up in the top of your skull. You always feel like saying to him: ‘Calm yourself, calm yourself, really it will come out!’ But, helpless with rage, he is carried irresistibly on.

The Tamil language is composed of words having, on an average, six syllables. Several have fourteen. When there are less than four syllables it is not a word any more, but a detritus. The English language seems to them a ruin. What are all those senseless little bubbles called the preposition, the article, etc.?

Tamil is an agglutinating language. You solder everything you can together. One word is made out of three.

In this way, though it is slightly more complicated, no doubt, the ten or fourteen syllables are formed.

These words are borne away at top speed. You touch the first syllable and you go galloping off. When you get to the end, you can take a rest. That is where little gaps in the conversation occur. However, some go at such headlong speed (most of them) that they do not stop. So you listen to this marvelous mechanism which, at a superhuman pace, accomplishes its natural purpose, without faltering.

They pronounce the words as though they were having a fit.

An unhappy childish haste, which is to be found again in the fixed expression of their eyes, fixed, yet at the same time making haste, making haste to see, making haste to see what? And doomed, obviously, to failure, though you do not know why.

When they sing, their song is like a hanging. They sing only to hang themselves, and high. They make straight for the most inaccessible notes, without a springboard, hang on in despair, and wavering between two or three higher notes, remain there crying, suffering, objects of pity, ready to let themselves be cut in pieces; but why? Then, all of a sudden, they stop short, and leave the mortal terror of the air above, then there are two minutes of silence, and up they climb again, or to be more exact, there they are again suddenly, more immensely unhappy than ever. And their tortures go on like that sometimes for over an hour.

They also adore a sort of oscillating between low and middle notes. They introduce an unbelievable number of words into an already rapid cadence, forming a recitation multiplied by four, the best thing that was done in the way of motion before the locomotive. And all this is not in the least disagreeable, ending in a little point that is rather mediocre, sourish, unsoaring, and quite like an operetta.

When it comes to speed, they have nothing to learn from anyone. Into their drama, which is more varied than anything of the kind in Europe, they introduce everything — the nine ingredients, comedy, morality, poetry, action, etc. The play goes on without interruption for seven hours, through from two to two hundred and fifty scenes, and heaven knows how many changes of scenery. All this with a style and with gestures that are merely suggested, and at once forgotten. The whole thing is diverting, full of life.

The cinema taught them nothing. They were already much faster. The gags are followed by bursts of laughter in the house, loud, but immediately after gobbled up, swallowed, vanished. Discharges.

There is a power in all this that says: ‘Come on, don’t dawdle, cut it short!’ Someone sings, the same song is taken up at once in another key. Then suddenly the melody is broken off altogether, and then the key is changed again. The actors go out, leaving no atmosphere behind them. The scenes pass rapidly by in the natural chronological order, following each other very closely, and a donkey could understand it. As there is no atmosphere, interruptions are of no consequence. On the stage, a man reduced to extreme poverty begs for charity. A fellow, in jest (they all have a sense of the comic; many of the scenes are extraordinarily droll), a fellow in the orchestra seats throws him an anna (a sou), and immediately the whole house amuses itself throwing annas. This lasted, I am sure, from eight to ten minutes, then began all over again.

Another time I was present at the last performance of a theatrical troupe. They were giving a drama with a tendency to moralize, and its subject was poignant.

Well, right in the middle of the dialogue, the audience got up on the stage (generally children, and several of them at a time) to present flowers and garlands which the actor at once put around his neck, and oranges which he stuffed in his pockets, or as far as possible kept in his hands, and the performance went on.

Extremely embarrassing custom to the European — the feminine roles are played by men dressed as women, a kind of abortion, most of them, with at times a beautiful contralto voice in falsetto.

‘These roles,’ as someone in the audience explained to me, ‘could not be played by women. They are too difficult(!). The young men that you will see have practiced from their earliest years to learn how to be effeminate. And a man who practices goes much farther than a woman.’

Here, indeed, I said to myself, are arguments. But when I saw the actors, I was not too disappointed. They had in fact many feminine reflexes, every instant, even when standing apart, of which a woman is neglectful, if I may say so.

But make-believe cannot have the value of the natural.

I saw afterwards, in Madras, Sundarambal, the great Tamil actress, a marvelous singer, the only beautiful Dravidian woman I ever saw, and one most truly talented. She seemed to have oil as well as blood in her body, and petroleum. When she appeared, she crushed the other women (who were men) even before she had made a gesture (she made few), before she had begun to sing. She possessed a wholesome femininity, that of a woman made of glands and soul. The others were coquettes, for the man cannot be a natural woman. They were trying to be women. She was trying to be a human being. She succeeded, without doubt. But existing in her was that essential, peculiar something, all the more exciting in that she paid no attention to it — femininity.

His rhythm alone would make the Southern Hindu more akin to the European than the Bengali.

The modern Tamil novels are like European novels — plenty of action.

The people of the South are not unlike the Italians (there are, in fact, a good many of them in Madras) and the Spanish.

They have a nice sense of the comic, and no European could ever ridicule caste institutions and their ‘sacred customs’ as do the Tamils today, and with matchless comedy.

And besides, they enjoy (contrary to the people of the North) seeing European films.

It is obvious that they do not want to set up their truth against that of European civilization.

(The same thing with the Negroes of Africa, and the same thing where their rhythm is concerned, and the ease with which they are Europeanized.)

While for the Bengali, unadulterated European culture will never be his culture. He will make something quite different out of it, and certainly quite remarkable.

I wonder whether the Hindu race, without its gift for the psychic, would have gone in so much for the occult.

Though many Hindus who have a European education have lost their metaphysical gifts, others, particularly among underlings, having not done much studying, and thus been less exposed to mental distortion, have retained them.

There was an employee of the South India Railway who, they assured me, cured snake bites.

As soon as someone was bitten, a relative ran to the station: ‘Where is so-and-so?’

‘Oh, he is on the train, on the… line.’

They telegraphed to him: ‘So and So. Snake. Bitten.’ The telegram flew from station to station in search of the train and the man.

They waited anxiously for the reply. At last it came: ‘He will be all right.’² And everyone went away rejoicing. And the poison was no longer effective.

What did the employee do? Well, he communed with himself for an instant in a compartment. ‘In the name of… (one or another of the saints) may the poison not rise.’ Then he went on punching tickets.

Hundreds of telegrams were exchanged thus, and quantities of venom turned to water.

Psychic gifts of a similar kind are to be found among all castes, the noblest as well as the most despised, even among barbers and cobblers.

You can understand how, in such a country, the distinctions between imbeciles and non-imbeciles are so unsatisfactory.

The employee mentioned was perhaps mentally an ‘imbecile,’ or even amoral, as often happens with them, but, nevertheless, making more complete use of the resources of the total being than his superiors.

In India, the critical mind is not what counts.

But is the critical mind anything to gape at?

Pilate had a critical mind, a distinguished mind. Even with Christ, he succeeded, after a fashion, in appearing to be the cleverer of the two. ‘What is truth?’ said he. And then exited. He was, in fact, referring to a mental truth. In this domain, one could not give him what does not exist.

The less approachable someone is, the more he has an inner life.

Such is the Englishman, and such the Bengali.

One cannot too strongly urge translators with the ‘gift of tongues’ to set to work on Bengali.

There is no literature so amazing and often so beautiful as Bengali literature. Tagore is not a lost islet. There is a quantity of writers, there are hundreds of works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to translate, for which I would exchange half of Europe’s literary production.

The poems, the novels, the prayers are easily translatable and have an irresistible appeal.

Each time I read a Bengali writing, after ten lines I am caught.

There is in Bengali literature something true, entirely true, and it is neither the holiness nor the truth, but the inner life.

When you read a Bengali, you cannot help loving him.

He moves, he is important. You are not obliged to stoop. You do not perceive, in reading him, that slow rhythm that is so annoying in his films. I, for one, do not mind. But the most indulgent Europeans have never been able to sit through an entire performance. Yet, if interest in knowing came before the pleasure of seeing the beautiful, one would have a cinema in Paris where Bengali films were shown. Those who want to think would find something there.

¹Magic in the full sense of the word; the reading of the RAMAYANA TULSI DAS absolves from all sin.

This Tulsi Das, who had written the RAMAYANA and the adventures of HANUMAN and of the army of monkeys, though indeeed a poet, was put in prison by a king.

He meditated in his prison, from his meditation came Hanuman and an army of monkeys who sacked the palace and the city and set him free.

And now let us have a contest: Where is the European poet who could do as much? Who is there that can bring forth as much as a mouse for his defense?

²(In English.)