A Vision of Things to Come

CURIOUSLY enough, when I think of Bombay, there is one picture which always comes first and most vividly to my memory. It is not a Parsee palace amid flowering gardens. It is not a Hindu temple with mysterious Yogees meditating in secluded shrines. It is no monument of British valor or of Asian art. Nor is it the ceaseless surge of the many-colored, bright-turbaned multitude along the bazaars and through picturesque native streets. It is not the awed, remote resting-place of the towers of silence. My preferred memory is something far simpler, more primitive than any of these, an old-world idyl of uncorrupted life.

An early-morning stroll had brought us, Mem-Sahib in a white felt helmet, and the recorder of these things similarly crowned, to an open space not far from our hotel, a reach of red earth and pebbles shaded by groups of trees with wide green leaves, which made ample isles of purple coolness in the golden welter of heat. In one of these pools of shade lay half a dozen buffaloes, blueblack huge antediluvian bodies, big awkward heads, with recurved corrugated horns and small eyes full of immense aboriginal peace.

Had these blinking, sniffing buffaloes not been so full of unashamed, unperturbed laziness, I should have fancied that they ruminated thus: ‘We know nothing of the ancient Vedas and the Upanishads; we are far older than they; we were old before they were invented. We cared nothing for them then. We care nothing for them now. We never shall care for them. We know nothing of Rama and the Mahabharata heroes, though they all knew us. Had we known them, it would not have mattered. Moslem conquerors, Arab, Persian, Mongol, are nothing to us. We dislike the British, and all foreign barbarians, but not enough to disturb our own repose. In fact, we are deeply happy, the one thing inviolably serene in this historic land, and we do not care for anything at all, except to lie here in the shadow, blinking our little eyes, snuffing the dust, and ruminating slowly, sleepily, in the rapture of supreme laziness.’

They lie there, basking in my memory, a wordless rebuke to human fever and fret, large, undisturbed, of tranquil spirit, the very Nirvana of four-footed things. But we were not destined, on that day at least, to share their restfulness, for good friends of ours, Tookaram Tatya, Rustumji the Parsee, Bhavani Rao the young Brahman from the north, and others of their company, had hospitably planned to carry us across the blue waters, to visit the antique caverns of Elephanta. They had chartered a curtained launch, and loaded her with many-colored exotic fruits: little cream bananas no larger than one’s finger, custardapples, papaws, green and red and yellow mangoes, and I know not what else; and presently we were puffing and bubbling through the shipping of the harbor, passing junks more ancient than Noah, then skimming alongside an English liner, then twisting through a group of fishing-craft with strongsmelling tarry rigging and strange gear piled in the bows.

Tookaram Tatya was far the most notable of the company, — a Hindu, but of no high caste, close to the soil, as his rugged dark face showed. He was all in white, with a turban, as I remember, altogether too small for him. Mr. Tookaram, as Rustumji, our Parsee fellow voyager, called him, was a merchant, active, skilled, successful, but with a dream in his heart that flamed out over the sordid matters of his trade. He spoke of it even then, as we skimmed across the blue, sparkling waters.

‘India is needed,’ he said, in that deep, intense voice of his, which so perfectly answered to the fire of his eyes. ‘ The whole world needs India, though the world does not know it. What has India to give? Commerce, inexhaustible raw materials, finer things like silk and enamel and bronze? Or temples and palaces and shrines? Or armies that shall go forth and win new lands? No; none of these things, I think. India has been the mother of nations and armies and wealth and arts, but far more was she the mother of inspiration, of the things that dwell in the light of the soul. You have forgotten the soul, you of the Western world, and we ourselves have almost forgotten. But the soul does not forget us or you. Even now, I think, the great spiritual powers are watching, waiting for the hour to strike, when once more the things of the soul shall be remembered and known.

‘I have read of your Western world, your anxious, feverish struggle, your toiling millions, your immense fear of death. Why are you gathered in struggling throngs, battening on the fat things of the world, flying from death, feverishly seeking sensations, filling your hearts and thoughts with excitement? Why do you so dread inevitable death? Because you have forgotten the soul. Why are your lives so small and mean and feverish, no larger than a coffin even while you are alive, finally ending in the coffin, when death takes you? Because you have no vision of real life, of the great wide reaches of spiritual power and light and life that encompass you about. It is as if we, on this launch, could not see the bright waters around us, and drove through darkness, hemmed about, shut in, beclouded, rushing forward, we know not whither. What a bewildering fever that would be! And life for most of you, in your western lands, is a bewilderment and a fever. You would cry out in terror, were you not so drugged by your dreams. You would see the darkness that encompasses you, and from very fear of it, you would seek the light. But your mirages fill your eyes, and you dream on, through the fretful fever you call life. It is no life, but a nightmare of fears and wild desires; while all about you are the great, luminous spaces of divine peace.’

‘But, Mr. Tookaram,’ objected Mem-Sahib, a little startled at the old man’s impetuous ardor, ‘I don’t think India is so much better off, at least what I have seen of it. Take the workers in the spinning-mills that Mr. Rustumji showed us yesterday: surely they toil as hard as our western workers, and I suppose even then they are far poorer and have fewer of the good things of life. And everybody has heard of the famines of India.’

‘Ah, that was not so in the olden time,’ interjected the young Brahman, Bhavani Rao, whose clear, handsome face and large, dark eyes contrasted so markedly with Tookaram Tatya’s dusky, rugged features. ‘It is because India is under foreign conquerors, because we have had century after century of invaders from the mountains, from the sea, from Central Asia; that is why we have famines and pestilences. That is why India has fallen!’

‘No, no, no!’ Tookaram’s deep voice replied, slowly. ‘Let us speak the truth. India has had invaders and conquerors because she had already fallen. And she fell because her leaders lost their faith. We had our old, ideal realm, Brahman and Kshattriya, Vaishya and Shudra. The Brahmans were the priests and lawgivers; the Kshattriyas were the princes and warriors; the Vaishyas were the bulk of the people, farmers and merchants; the Shudras were the serfs, but well-guarded, well-tended serfs. And, while each caste held its ideal, all went well. Those were born into each caste whose souls needed that experience, and by rightly fulfilling his caste-work, each could gain salvation, each could find his own soul. The Brahman was to be a true Brahman, wise, pure, unworldly, seeking to preserve the spiritual science, working for the welfare of all, seeing beyond the barrier of death into the still, sunlit sea of everlasting life. The Kshattriya was to be brave, valorous, generous, a fearless soldier and king, all his life devoted to the good of the people, a giver of gifts, a just judge, a ruler of armies. The Vaishya should be honest, sober, clean, busy about his tasks, contributing food for the other castes. The Shudra, limited in thought, in imagination, in capacity, learned by serving the others, who had these things, and in the fullness of time he, too, was born into a share of them.’

‘But,’ again objected Mem-Sahib, ‘do you really mean that such a wonderful condition of things actually existed in India?’

‘The ideal was everywhere,’ answered Mr. Tookaram. ‘The approach to the ideal, the effort to reach it, was everywhere. And all men and women, forgetting themselves, lived for their souls, the body of to-day being but the serf, the Shudra, as it were, or the foodproviding Vaishya, for the enduring man within, who was the Brahman, the Kshattriya, the priest and king of spiritual life. But faith waned and India fell. And indeed, I think,’ Tookaram went on, fixing his keen eyes on Bhavani Rao’s bright, intelligent face, ‘I think that you, the Brahmans, are most greatly to be blamed. You should have been a spiritual caste, dwelling in the unseen, leading others thither, living already in the immortal, conquerors over this world; you fell from purity, and became a priestcraft, greedy for presents, telling fortunes for hire!’

Bhavani Rao flushed deeply under his golden-brown skin, and, for a moment, his eyes grew dark with anger and a sharp retort was on his lips. But he loved the elder man, and had within himself also the hidden monitor of justice, who adjured him that the old man spoke truth.

‘You are not offended, I hope?’ Tookaram said, gently smiling at Bhavani Rao. ‘It is the loss of all of us, and you know well that I believe you will rise again; that India will once more live, that the light will shine as of old.’

What might have grown to a dispute was checked, perforce, as we were slowing down now, at the landing on Elephanta Island. The hood of the launch had hidden our approach, and the eager old man’s words had absorbed our thoughts, but now, looking forth, we saw the huge green pyramid rising from the waves, a pointed hill heavily draped with leafy greenery, from which rose date-palms, like red pillars crowned with green, and waving ferns. An ancient pathway of red stone led up the hillside from the landing, and, struggling ashore from the launch, we began to toil upward in the sunshine, whose fervor was but slightly mitigated by the cotton umbrellas of our hosts.

Here again, by the caprice of memory, what remains most vividly in my thought is not the splendid old temple carved from the living rock, but a little detail of the journey, quite detached and unimportant. As we began to climb the long, abrupt pathway up the hill, Mem-Sahib going ahead with Rustumji, and Tookaram accompanying the recorder of these doings, we were suddenly beset by a swarm of small boys, magnificently dight in polished brown skins to which the scant added loin-cloth seemed a mere impertinent adjunct, and with shiny eyes and teeth. Chattering like monkeys, they struggled round us, exhibiting to us the most wonderful golden beetles, scarab-shaped and gleaming like golden bronze. Others were variations on the theme of the Spanish fly from which, they say, our hair-washes are compounded, — emerald-coated fellows, newly burnished; yet others — and these both MemSahib and I particularly gloated over — were exactly like crawling little golden tortoises, the size of one’s thumb-nail.

The small, brown, chattering monkeys who swarmed about us, and who were the owners, probably the collectors, of all this living jewelry, burned with zeal to transfer their property in it to our humble, barbarian selves, for the merest dross of small silver or even copper coins; and it seemed to me a hardship, when the old prophet of India’s regeneration began to poke them in the ribs with his green cotton umbrella, and to command them, as I suppose, in fluent Gujerati, to carry their wares to other markets. Nevertheless Mem-Sahib and I purchased some beetles. Later, in Madras, we saw the wings of these same insectjewels made into embroidery, stitched on black veiling set off with gold thread; very frail, but very beautiful.

This, then, remains the outstanding picture, as foreground for the great, reverent caves. I overheard Rustumji telling Mem-Sahib about his master, Sir Dinshaw Petit, whose mills we had visited under Rustumji’s tutelage, and whose palace on Malabar hill we were to see on the morrow: a notable, benignant old man, with a face carved of ivory and eyes like black opals. Like all the Parsees, he wore a shiny black mitre, that gave him something the air of a bishop at chess; but there was no mistaking his power, his keenness, his benevolence.

‘Sir Dinshaw Petit,’ Rustumji was saying, ‘built his great fortune on the ruins of Manchester, when the American Civil War stopped the export of cotton from the Southern States. He sent quickly to England, bought machinery at a bargain, drew on the great cotton fields of the Dekkan and the cheap labor market of Bombay, and within a few years his fortune was made. I have been told,’ went on Rustumji, with deep pride in the munificent head of the Parsee community, ‘that Sir Dinshaw Petit has given in charity, for hospitals and good works, not less than five million pounds sterling.’

On the morrow, we had the pleasure of calling on Sir Dinshaw. The two curios of his house were a fine alabaster model of the Taj Mahal, and his little grandson, a living porcelain baby, preternaturally dainty and grave, with a crimson cap woven in the famous mills, and having, as pattern, the name Petit endlessly repeated. I never saw children so charming as these little Parsee babies: Dresden china figures, in Oriental drapery. One longed, then and there, to make a collection of them, as one might collect old vases from Japan. It is inconceivable to me that they should ever pout or howl.

By this time, we had mounted the long stairway to the caves, halfway up the big pyramid hill. Part of the portico, as I suppose one must call it, has been chipped and broken away by vandals, but one can clearly perceive the magnificence of the whole design: a bold attempt to carve, in the red volcanic rock, an exact model of one of the great Indian temples, with hall after hall entering the one into the other. The figures in high relief are admirable, very Egyptian in form and feature, as it seemed to me, the red rock increasing the resemblance.

At this point there was a diversion. From a kind of cottage or hut entered, to the company already enumerated, a Kala Sahib, which is the satirical native appellation for a Eurasian. It is as who should say, ‘A black European, a black gentleman of Europe.’ This particular Kala Sahib was dusky yellow rather than black, and I apprehend that he was the offspring of a cockney soldier and some enamored sweeping-woman of the barracks. He had something of the air of both. His suppositious parent, or some one else, had had influence enough to get him the position of curator-in-ordinary of the Elephanta caves and expositor of their mythological significance; the which significance, with a jaunty swagger, and aided in his demonstrations by a natty little cane, he proceeded to set forth in some such fashion as this.

’Look ’ere, lydies and gentlemen!’ he said, waving his cane at a fine relief carving of the Ramayana heroes, ‘this ’ere is Rammer and Seater; the lydy is Seater, you understand. And this ’ere is Ravanner; ’e was a terror, ’e was! Oh, my eye!’ And here he leered understandingly at us, as if to intimate that he himself, the Kala Sahib, was something of a terror, too. ‘This ’ere joker, Ravanner, an’ a bloomin’ good name for ’im, too, cast ’is heye on Seater . . .’

I looked round at our native friends. Bhavani Rao’s handsome face was dark with suppressed indignation. Rustumji was visibly perturbed. But Tookaram Tatya, the sturdy old Mahratta, rose instantly to the occasion.

‘Look here, my man,’ he said, adding financial doings to his little speech, ‘we know all about those things. It is too hot for you here. Go home, and rest in the shade! Go! ’ And he waved the formidable green umbrella at the Kala Sahib with such good effect that we were presently left alone. Yet there was a certain wild charm about the Kala Sahib’s extempore translations from Valmiki.

In one of the cool cavern halls, there is a notable group of figures carved in high relief on the red rock wall. It represents the Hindu Trinity, the Tri-murti, to use the Sanskrit name— the three forms of the one Divinity. Bhavani Rao, who was a fine Sanskrit scholar, and, like so many Brahmans, knew all his sacred books by heart, undertook to set forth for us the significance of the great triune figure.

‘Brahman, the unmanifest Deity,’ he said, ‘is held to be embodied in a three-fold form, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer-regenerator. Brahma the creator is the God of beginnings, the Father; Vishnu the preserver is the God of the present manifest world, he who watches over all mankind, he who sends his spirit forth, in divine incarnations, Avatars, like Rama and Krishna and Buddha, who live and suffer for mankind.’

‘What is the exact meaning of Avatar?’ queried Mem-Sahib.

‘In ancient times,’ answered Bhavani Rao, ‘we had few or no bridges over our great rivers, and those who would cross had to seek a ford —’

‘Like Oxford and Wallingford, on the Thames,’ interposed Mr. Tookaram, who was a great student of Western things.

‘And the word for fording the river is the root tar. From the same root comes tirtha, a shrine at a ford. With the prefix, Ava-tar means one who, having already forded the great river, the river of death, crosses back again through the flood, to take others by the hand, to lead them also through. That is what Krishna did, and Buddha, and so many others. That is what the great Masters of Compassion forever do.’

‘A wonderful word, and a wonderful thought, but you were telling us about the Tri-murti.’

Bhavani Rao continued: —

‘Yes. There is a passage in the Harivansha ’; and he began to intone Sanskrit verses in his fine, resonant voice: —

‘It is where Brahma, the great Father, finding Shiva in contest with Krishna, who is Vishnu, reproves the God, telling him that he is fighting against himself: “When thou showest me this auspicious vision, I perceive thereby no difference between Shiva who exists in the form of Vishnu, and Vishnu who exists in the form of Shiva. I shall declare to thee that form composed of Vishnu and Shiva combined, which is without beginning or middle or end, imperishable, that passes not away. He who is Vishnu is Shiva; he who is Shiva is Brahma, the Father; the substance is one, the Gods are three, Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, the great Father. Vishnu, the highest manifestation of Shiva, and Shiva, the highest manifestation of Vishnu, this God, one only, though divided into twain, moves continually in the world. Vishnu exists not without Shiva, nor Shiva without Vishnu, hence these two Gods, Shiva and Vishnu, dwell in oneness.” ’

Bhavani Rao became silent, evidently pondering over the great triune mystery. Then, after a time, he spoke again: —

‘There is another passage in the Mahabharata, which exactly describes this statue here: “This is the glorious God, the beginning of all existences, imperishable, who knows the formation of all principles, who is the Supreme Spirit; who (the Lord) created Brahma from his right side, originator of all worlds, and from his left side Vishnu, preserver of the universe, and, when the end of the age had come, that mighty Lord created Shiva destroyer and regenerator.” In our scriptures,’ he went on, his face glowing with the high inspiration of those old days, ‘all things teach of the great divine Unity. It is the same in the Bhagavad Gita, the sermon of God Krishna, just before the battle of the Great War. The war is life, the great struggle for the soul, for immortality. Krishna is the Higher Self, Arjuna is the personal self, the mortal man, struggling under the burden of the immortal. The two are one. “Arjuna is the soul of Krishna, and Krishna is the soul of Arjuna.” And again, “This Narayana is Krishna, and Nara, Man, is called Arjuna. Narayana and Nara are one being, divided into twain. They are born at different places, at the time of the great battle, again and again.”’

We stood there, in the entrance of the great, sacred cave-temple, a place of pilgrimage for one knows not how many ages. Behind us was cool shadow, gathering into darkness in the receding temple-chambers of the venerable cave. Before us was the glistering sunshine, with green undergrowth and date-palms, pillar-like, in the foreground; and, behind and below them, the hillside falling away in terraces of descending greenery to the sparkling turquoise of the sea. Above all was the sky, too radiant, too fervent, too brilliant for our eyes to bear, shining like the glory of the soul over this our human life.

‘ “They are born again, at the time of the great battle,” ’ repeated Tookaram, taking up the young Brahman’s words. ‘The mystery is not in the past alone, but in the future also. Behind us, shadows; but before us, light. So will India be born again, rising, after many days, in a new vigor and youth, for the inspiring of the nations; bringing the superb spiritual light that shines over life and death alike, in serene splendor, hallowing, blessing, sanctifying all mortal things; illumining all, and showing all as the handiwork of the great Father, for the training and teaching of our souls. India will rise again, in the fullness of time, for the whole world needs India and the luminous, age-old lore of our divinity.’