PREFACE
Francis Bacon it was who said, “Prefaces are great wastes of time, and tho’ they seem to proceed of modesty, they are bravery.” It is necessary, however, in the present instance to make a stand against the somewhat sweeping convictions of the Elizabethan master. The call of Youth in India is a hot young call, trumpeting down the ages through a maze of polytheistic tribute, and emerging in the twentieth century with some of its original clearness of sound drowned by a Gargantuan thunder of Western drums. The Indian poet of to-day is torn, like the Indian painter, between admiration for Western models and a desire to mould himself thereon, and an inherent Indian tradition that runs in his veins and will not be denied. Indeed, it is pity to deny it. Sir Edmund Gosse persuaded Sarojini Naidu to tear up her poems about English life and to write of her own Indian bazaars and cities, villages and festivals, for which persuasion we are indeed indebted to Sir Edmund. We of the West do not want from the East poetic edifices built upon a foundation of Yeats and Shelley and Walt Whitman. We want genuine Taj Mahals and Juma Masjids, cameos of rural sweetness and the hopes of faithful hearts. We want to hear the flute of Krishna as Radha heard it, to fall under the spell of the blue god “in the lotus-heart of dreams.” For there is much to learn from the melody of Eastern thought. It is, perhaps, a minor melody born of the mating of Love and Death, but it has its seed in an innate spiritual rapture that no Western veneer can wholly cover.
In the bulk of Indian poetry religious feeling predominates, as is only natural in a country of many but steadfast faiths.
“To act, to think, to feel aright until
He knows his will as one with Allah’s will.”
Subjugation of the Self leading to a merging of that Self with God. India writes largely from the “Inner Vision.” This disallows of foreign influence, but the poet is necessarily inspired as well by an everyday atmosphere which he enriches from the strength of his own perception. The steps of the bathing-ghâts in Calcutta may be of Sheffield cast-iron, but the country that could produce a Taj Mahal—“stone turned into a dream,” D. G. Mukerji calls it—will never lose the innate artistic vision of her soul. So the creative prayers of this mighty cosmopolitan multitude surge upwards in a song of glory till they reach the stars. Love of life is love of art because life is art and art is life. We chase after fleeting perfection, a rosy cloud, a glint of eternity in a lily-pool, a drop of dew trembling on a flower-petal, moments of heaven in worlds of chaos. To catch a mood of Nature and transfer it to paper; to wring from the heart of an instrument one swift emotional phase after another: is it futile? is it useless?
“Am I one of the trees in the night,
Or are the trees human beings?”
asks Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in one of his poems not published here, echoing the cry of Li Po:
“Chuang Chou in a dream became a butterfly
And the butterfly became Chuang Chou at waking:
Which was the real, the butterfly or the man?”
In Indian poetry, the mystic element shines through the outer decorative aspect.