[Reader-list] The collected works of Aldous Huxley

[Pawan Durani]

Page (20 to 39)

KASHMIR
IT is cheaper in this country to have a waggon pulled by half a dozen
men than by a pair of oxen or horses.All day, on the road below our
house, the heavyladen carts go creaking slowly along behind their team
of human draft animals. The coolies sing as they pull, partly out of
sheer lightness of heart (for these Kashmiris are wonderfully
cheerful, in spite of everything), and partly, no doubt, because they
have discovered the psychological fact that to sing in chorus creates
a strengthening sense of solidarity within the singing group, and
seems to lighten the work in hand by making the muscular effort
respond almost automatically to a regular rhythmic stimulus. I noticed
two main types of labourer's chantey. One of these is melodically
quite ambitious; for it ranges over no less than three notes of the
minor scale. It is sung in unison, and there is no separate chorus
leader. The commonest form of the melody is more or less as follows:

Da capo ad infinitum. They sing it all day at their work and half the
night as well, for fun, when there happens to be a wedding or some
similar festival. The other chantey takes the form of a kind of
dialogue between the chorus and a chorus leader, who responds to the
two strong beats of the choral song by a single monosyllable, always
the same, sustained for two beats, and sung emphatically on a lower
note. The words were incomprehensible to me; but translated into terms
of gibberish, they sounded something like this: Chorus, Dum-dum.
Leader, BONG. Chorus, Tweedle-dum. Leader,BONG; Tum-diddy, BONG;
Tweedle-weedle, BONG. And so on, hour after hour.

This rhythmical dialogue is the favourite music of the waggon teams.
Walking abroad, one is never for long out of hearing of that
monotonous Dum-dum, BONG; diddy-dum, BONG. The singing floats down
between the poplar trees of the straight flat roads of the valley, and
slowly, laboriously the waggon and its human crew come following after
the swift-travelling song. Passing, I feel almost ashamed to look at
the creeping wain; I avert my eyes from a spectacle so painfully
accusatory. That men should be reduced to the performance of a labour
which, even for beasts, is cruel and humiliating, is a dreadful thing.
' Ah, but they feel things less than we do,' the owners of motor-cars,
the eaters of five meals a day, the absorbers of whisky hasten to
assure me; ' they feel them less, because they 're used to this sort
of life. They don't mind, because they know no better. They 're really
quite happy.'

And these assertions are quite true. They do not know better; they are
used to this life; they are incredibly resigned. All the more shame to
the men and to the system that have reduced them to such an existence
and kept them from knowing anything better.

It is in relation to their opposites that things have significance for
us. ' Opposite shows up opposite, as a Frank a negro.' So wrote Jalalu
'd-Din Muhammad Rumi. 'The opposite of light shows what is light....
God created grief and pain for this purpose: to wit, to manifest
happiness by its opposites. Hidden things are manifested by their
opposites; but as God has no opposite, He remains hidden.' These
Kashmiri draft coolies, who are unaware of comfort, culture, plenty,
privacy, leisure, security, freedom, do not in consequence know that
they are slaves, do not repine at being herded together in filthy
hovels like beasts, do not suffer from their ignorance, and are
resigned to being overworked and underfed. Those who profit by the
Kashmiri's ignorant acquiescence in such subhuman conditions are
naturally not anxious that they should be made aware of the desirable
opposites which would make their present life seem odious. The spread
of education, the improvement of living conditions are causes which do
not rouse them to enthusiasm. And yet, in spite of everything, the
spirit of humanitarianism works even through these reluctant agents.
For the spirit of humanitarianism is the spirit of the age, which it
is impossible for any man, born with the usual supply of social
instinct and suggestibility, completely to ignore. His reason may tell
him that his own personal advantage would be best served if he kept
the disinherited in their places. But a stronger force than reason is
for ever trying to make' him act against reason. To be utterly
ruthless towards the disinherited would be profitable; but he can
never bring himself to be utterly ruthless. In spite of himself, he
feels that he ought to give them justice. And he gives it-not very
often, no doubt, and not very much at a time-but still, he gives it;
that is the queer, significant, and modern thing. Even in Kashmir a
tiny pinch of this humanitarian commodity-as yet, however, all but
invisiblehas begun to be distributed.

Srinagar

THE Mogul gardens are disappointingly inferior to any of the more or
less contemporary gardens of Italy. Shalimar and Nishat Bagh cannot
compare with the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, or the Villa Lanti, near
Viterbo. The little Chashma Shahi is architecturally the most charming
of the gardens near Srinagar. And the loveliest for trees and waters
is Atchibal, at the upper end of the valley; while far-off Verinag,
where Jahangir enclosed the blue deep source of the Jhelum in an
octagonal tank surrounded by arcades, has a strange and desolate
beauty all its own. But in general it may be said that the design of
all these Indian gardens is rigid, monotonous, and lacking entirely in
the Italian grandiosity, the Italian fertility of invention. The
architecture of the pleasure houses which they contain is petty and
almost rustic. The decorative details, such of them, at any rate, as
remain-for the ornamentation was mostly of a rather gimcrack and
temporary character-are without much originality. How greatly the
Mogul architects were handicapped by the profession of a religion
which forbade the introduction of the human form into their decorative
schemes is manifested especially in their fountains. A fountain in one
of these gardens is just a nozzle sticking out of the ground, the end
of a hose-pipe turned vertically upwards. Miserable object, and
unworthy of the name of fountain! I shut my eyes and think of those
Bolognese mermaids with their spouting breasts; those boys and
tortoises at Rome, all black and shining with wetness; those naiads
and river-gods and gesticulating allegories among the rainbows and the
falling crystals of the Piazza Navons; those Tritons at the Villa
Lanti with their prancing sea-horses-all the fantastic world of
tutelary deities that stand guard over Italian springs. The Moguls
were good Mohammedans and content with unadorned nozzles.

If the Kashmiri gardens are beautiful, that is the work, not so much
of man as of nature. The formal beds are full of xinnias and scarlet
cannas. The turf is fresh and green. The huge chenar trees go up into
the pale bright sky; their white trunks shine between the leaves,
which the autumn has turned to a rusty vermilion. Behind them are the
steep bare hills, crested already with snow. Their colour, where the
sun strikes them, is a kind of silvery-glaucous gold and, in the
shadows, a deep intense indigo. Below, on the other side, stretches
the Dal Lake, with the isolated fortcrowned hill of Hari-Parbat on the
further shore. The sun shines out of a flawless sky, but the air is
cool against the face. ' It is a nipping and an eager air'; for we are
at more than five thousand feet above the sea. The Great Moguls
regarded Kashmir as the earthly paradise. And a paradise to one coming
fresh from the earthly hell of the Panjab in summer it must indeed
have seemed. The visitor from temperate lands finds it less
paradisiacal because more familiar. The lakes and mountains remind us
of Switzerland and Italy, and in the level valley, with its
interminable poplar avenues, its waterways, and soggy fields, we find
ourselves thinking of France, of Holland even. Our ecstasies of
admiration are reserved for the unfamiliar tropics.

Srinagar

IN the autumn great flocks of teal and mallard come through Kashmir,
on their way from the breedinggrounds to their winter home in Northern
India. Some breed in the recesses of Ladakh, a few hundred miles only
from the Kashmir valley; but the majority, it is said, go further
afield into Central Asia, possibly even into Siberia, where so many
migrants pass the brief but generous summer. In the autumn they fly
southwards, over the Himalayas, into India. Some varieties of these
water-fowl cross the range at the eastern end, some to the west. Thus
the cotton-tail, I am assured by sportsmen, is found in Assam and
Bengal, but not in the Panjab; while the mallard is seen only in the
west. How these birds, which normally spend their lives in the plain,
contrive to pass the Himalayas without dying of mountain-sickness or
asphyxiation on the way, is something of a mystery. Most small
animals, when taken up suddenly to a height of fifteen or twenty
thousand feet-and many of the Himalayan passes touch these
heights-simply die. The migrating duck, if it really does come down
from Central Asia, must be flying at these altitudes for miles at a
stretch. Physiologically, the feat seems almost as extraordinary as
that of the eel, which leaves its native pond or river to breed, two
or three thousand miles away, in the deep water of the ocean.

It would be interesting to know the feelings of a migrant animal, when
the moment has arrived for it to perform its journey. The swallow at
the end of the summer, the salmon when, having attained its maximum
weight, it feels that the time has come, for it to go up into the
rivers, the fresh-water eel at the approach of its first and final
breeding season, must feel, I imagine, much as a man might feel when
suddenly converted, or who finds himself compelled by an irresistible
sense of duty to perform some hazardous and disagreeable enterprise.
Some power within them-an immanent godcommands them to change their
comfortable way of life for a new and arduous existence. There is no
disobeying the command; the god compels. If eels could formulate their
theories of ethics, they would be eloquent, I am sure, about the
categorical imperative and the compulsive character of the sense of
duty.

Our categorical imperatives, like those of eels and swallows, are
generally backed by the forces of an instinct. Our social instinct
deters us from doing what we think would be condemned, and encourages
us to do what we think would be commended by our equals, by our moral
superiors, by our 'better selves,' by ' God.' But there are occasions,
curiously enough, when the categorical imperative to do or refrain
from doing seems to have no connection with a compulsive instinct. For
example, a man writes two letters, addresses two envelopes, puts the
letters into the envelopes, and seals them up. lHe is extremely
careful when inserting the letters, to see that each goes into its
proper envelope. Nevertheless, a few minutes later, he is seized by an
irresistible desire to reopen the envelopes so as to make sure that
the letter to his mistress is not in the envelope addressed to his
maiden aunt, and vice versa. He knows that each letter is where it
should be. But despite his conviction, despite the derisive comments
of the rational part of his mind, he does reopen the envelopes. The
categorical imperative is stronger than reason. It may be so strong
that after five more minutes, he will open the envelopes a second
time.

What gives the imperative its strength in cases such as this, I am at
a loss to imagine. The August cuckoo takes wing for Africa at the
command of a special migratory instinct. A desire born of his social
instinct, to win the approval of his fellows, of some hypostasised '
better self' or ' personal god,' makes a man act honourably in
circumstances where it would be more profitable and more convenient to
act dishonourably. But when a man reopens an envelope to see if it
contains the letter he knows it does contain, when he gets out of bed
on a cold night to make sure that he has switched off the light and
bolted the doors which he clearly remembers turning out and bolting
ten minutes before, no primary instinct can be invoked to account for
the compulsive nature of the desire to do these irrational things. In
such cases the categorical imperative seems to be morally senseless
and psychologically unaccountable. It is as though a god were playing
practical jokes.

Srinagar

THE Kashmiris are proverbial throughout India for the filthiness of
their habits. Wherever a choice is offered them between cleanliness
and dirt,they will infallibly choose the latter. They have a genius
for filthiness. We had daily opportunities of observing the
manifestations of this peculiar genius. Our compound was provided with
water from the city supply. From a tap at the end of the garden we
could draw the pure filtered water of the reservoir among the
mountains. The water from this tap, which was left running for hours
at a time, was collected in a small brick-lined tank, on which the
gardener drew for the watering of his flowers. And not the gardener
only. We found that our servants had an almost irresistible desire to
fetch our washing and drinking water from the same source. The fresh
water ran sparkling from the tap; but their instinct was to take only
the standing fluid in the uncovered tank. And to what uses the tank
was put I Looking out in the morning, we could see our sweeper
crouching on the brink to perform his ablutions. First he washed his
hands, then his feet, then his face; after that he thoroughly rinsed
his mouth, gargled and spat into the tank. Then he douched his nose.
And when that was finished, he scooped some water in his hands and
took a drink. A yard away was the tap. He preferred the tastier water
of the tank.

The astonishing thing is that epidemics are not more frequent and
severe than is actually the case. That they are not is due, I suppose,
to the powerful disinfectant action of the sunlight. Perhaps also an
almost daily and domestic familiarity with the germs of typhoid and
cholera has bred among Kashmiri phagocytes a healthy contempt for
their attacks, together with increased powers of resistance.

THE Kashmiri pandit has a more than Spanish objection to manual
labour. But, unlike the hidalgo who thought himself dishonoured by the
exercise of any profession save that of arms, the pandit is ambitious
of wielding only the pen. He may be abjectly poor (most people are
abjectly poor in Kashmir); but he will do only a pandit's work.
Chauffeurs may get good wages, servants are clothed and fed; but the
proud pandit had rather walk the streets begging than accept
employments so derogatory to his Brahmin dignity.
There are many pandits in Kashmir. They are all educated, more or
less, and all equally proud. The consequence is that, in Kashmir, you
can hire a clerk for about half as much as you would have to pay your
cook. And not in Kashmir only. It is the same throughout the whole of
India. A circus recently visited Lahore. The management advertised for
gate-keepers at fifteen rupees a month. Among the applicants, I was
told, were upwards of forty graduates. Mysore, the best-governed of
the Indian States, finds the same difficulty in disposing of the
finished products of its higher education. After having gone to the
trouble of taking their degrees, the graduates of its colleges demand,
almost as a right (it is only natural), the work for which their
educational attainments fit them. But the work does not exist.
That is the farcical tragedy of Indian education. The Universities
produce a swarm of graduates, for whom there is nothing to do. The
State can employ only a limited number of them, and, outside the
government service, there is almost no opening for a man with the
ordinary general education of the West. The industrial and commercial
activities, to which most of our young educated men devote themselves,
hardly exist in India. There is no available liquid capital to start
such industries on a large scale, and the average educated Indian
lacks the enterprise and energy to begin in a small way on his own.
His ambition is to step into some safe clerical job with no
responsibilities, and a pension at the end of it. A ' crammed '
education in the humanities or in pure science hardly fits him for
anything else. Unhappily, the number of safe clerkships with pensions
attached is strictly limited. The Indian youth steps out of the
University examination hall into a vacuum. The class of educated
unemployed-the class most dangerous to an established
government-steadily grows.

Srinagar

EDUCATED Indians of the older generation have a great weakness for
apophthegms, quotations, and cracker mottoes. They punctuate their
conversation with an occasional ' As the Persian poet so beautifully
puts it ': then follows a string of incomprehensible syllables, with
their appended translation, which generally embodies some such gem of
human wisdom as 'Honesty is the best policy,' or 'The higher the art,
the lower the morals,' or ' My uncle's house is on a hill, but I
cannot eat this rotten cabbage.' Those whose education has been of a
more occidental cast have Gray's Elegy, the works of Sir Edwin Arnold,
and the more sententious parts of Shakespeare at their finger-tips.
But among the younger Indians the quotation habit seems to be dying
out. Their wisdom is diffuse and unquotable. Their minds are stored
with the nebulous debris of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and popular
science booklets, not with heroic couplets.

It is the same with us in the West. Latin tags issue from the mouths
only of the aged. The days when Virgil and Horace were bandied from
one side of the House of Commons to the other are past. Latin with us,
like Persian among the Indians, is a deader language than it was a
century, even a generation ago. Even the English classics are rarely
quoted now. Young people trot out their Shakespeare less frequently
than do their elders. The reason, I suppose, is this: we read so much,
that we have lost the art of remembering. Indeed, most of what we read
is nonsense, and not meant to be remembered. The man who remembered
the social paragraphs in his morning paper would deserve to be sent to
an asylum. So it comes about that we forget even that which is not
worthy of oblivion. Moreover, to young people brought up in this queer
provisional patchwork age of ours, and saturated with its spirit, it
seems absurd to collect the rags of thought bequeathed by other and,
they feel, utterly different ages. What is the use of knowing, in
I925, that 'when lovely woman stoops to folly,' the best, the only
thing she can do ' is to die'? What is the good of asserting baldly
that 'the quality of mercy is not strained,'that ' God 's in His
heaven, all 's right with the world'? These poetical statements have
no meaning for us. When lovely woman stoops to folly, we do not think
of death - we think of suppressed complexes and birth-control and the
rights of the unmarried mother. About the quality of mercy we have our
own contemporary ideas; how we regard it depends on whether we are
followers of Gandhi on the one hand, or of Sorel, Lenin, and Mussolini
on the other. It falleth as the gentle dew from heaven; it is twice
blest. No doubt. But what is this to us, who have our peculiar
problems about the rights and wrongs of violence to decide in our own
way? And what meaning for us have those airy assertions about God?
God, we psychologists know, is a sensation in the pit of the stomach,
hypostasised; God, the personal God of Browning and the modern
theologian, is the gratuitous intellectualist interpretation of
immediate psycho - physiological experiences. The experiences are
indubitably true for those who feel them; but the interpretation of
them in terms of Browning's personal God is illogical and
unjustifiable.

No, decidedly, the cracker mottoes of the ancients are of no use to
us. We need our own tags and catch-words. The preceding paragraph is
full of them: complex, birth-control, violence for an idea,
psychology, and the rest. Few of these words or of the ideas for which
they stand have yet found their way into poetry. For example, God, the
intellectually interpreted sensation in the pit of the stomach, has
not yet been crystallised into couplets. His home is still the
text-book, the Hibbert Journal article. Like most of the rest of our
ideas He is unquotable. The ancients were able to build up their
notions of the world at large round an elegant poetical skeleton. L
Less fortunate, we have only a collection of scientific, or
sham-scientific, words and phrases to serve as the framework of our
philosophy of life. Our minds and our conversation are consequently
less elegant than those of our fathers, whose ideas had crystallised
round such pleasing phrases as ' Sunt lacrimae rerum,' ' I could not
love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more,' and ' A sense of
something far more deeply interfused.' Some day, it may be, a poet
will be found to reduce our catch-words to memorable artistic form. By
that time, however, they will probably be as meaninglessly out-of-date
as the cracker mottoes of the classics.

Srinagar

SRINAGAR owns a large population of sacred cows and bulls that wander
vaguely through the streets, picking up such vegetable garbage, grass,
and fallen leaves as they can find. They are small beaststhe half of
good-sized English cattle-and marvellously mild. Red rags mean nothing
to these little bulls, they can be trusted in china shopseven in
nurseries. Liberty, underfeeding, and unlimited access to the females
of their species account, no doubt, for this surprising gentleness.

But, though harmless, these Hindu totems are passively a nuisance.
They will not attack you as you walk or drive along the streets, but
neither will they get out of your way. They stand there, meditatively
ruminating, in the middle of the road, and no shouting, no ringing of
bells or hooting of horns will send them away. Not until you are right
on top of them will they move. The fact is, of course, that they know
their own sacredness. They have learned by long experience that they
can stand in the road as much as they like and that, however furiously
the klaxon sounds, nothing will ever happen to them. Nothing; for
Kashmir, though its inhabitants are mostly Mohammedans, is ruled by a
pious Hindu dynasty. Up till a few years ago a man who killed a cow
was sentenced to death. Under a milder dispensation he now gets only a
matter of seven years' penal servitude. A salutary fear of cows is
rooted in the breast of every Kashmiri chauffeur. And the totems know
it. With a majestic impertinence they stroll along the middle of the
roads. When one is a god, one does not disturb oneself for the
convenience of mere man, however importunate.

To the eye of pure reason there is something singularly illogical
about the way in which the Hindus shrink from killing cows or eating
their flesh when dead, but have no scruples about making the life of
the sacred beasts, by their ill-treatment, a hell on earth. So strict
is the orthodoxy of Kashmir, that Bovril is confiscated at the
frontier, and sportsmen are forbidden to shoot the wild nilgai, which
is not bovine at all, but happens to be miscalled the ' blue cow ';
the very name is sacred. And yet nothing is done to protect these
god-like animals from any cruelty that does not actually result in
death. They are underfed and, when used as draft animals, mercilessly
overdriven. When the goad fails to make them move, their driver will
seize them by the tail and, going through the motions of one who tries
to start up a Ford car, violently twist. In winter, when fodder runs
short, the Kashmiris pack their beasts together in a confined space
until they begin to sweat, then turn them out into the snow, in the
hope that they will catch pneumonia and die. To the eye of reason, I
repeat it, it certainly seems strange. But then the majority of human
actions are not meant to be looked at with the eye of reason.

Srinagar

IT takes the Tartar traders six weeks of walking to get from Kashgar
to Srinagar. They start with their yaks and ponies in the early
autumn, when the passes are still free from snow and the rivers,
swollen in summer by its melting, have subsided to fordableness. They
walk into Kashmir, and from Kashmir into India. They spend the winter
in India, sell what they have brought, and in the following spring,
when the passes are once more open, go back into Turkestan with a load
of Indian and European fabrics, velvet and plush and ordinary cotton,
which they sell for fabulous profit in their own country.

We paid a visit to the Central Asian sarai at Srinagar where the
Tartars halt for a rest on their way down into India. A dozen
merchants with their servants were encamped there: strange Mongolian
men, high-booted, trousered, jerkined in thick cloth or sheepskin.
They showed us their wares: carpets, costly and cheap, from Kashgar
and the other oasis cities of the Tarim basin; coarse felt mats, on
which were rudely printed in red and blue the most exquisite designs;
hand-woven and hand-printed cottons from Turkestan; Chinese silks,
jade and crystal; furs. We bought a rug of the poorest quality, a
thing of more cotton than wool, but superbly patterned in colours that
were none the less beautiful for being manifestly aniline. Also a felt
mat in the design of which a Greek decorative motive played a leading
part. That identity of the contemporary with the ancient and classical
form-was it due to the coincidence of reinvention, to a modern
importation from the West? Or was it due, as I liked to think it was,
to the survival, through centuries of change and tumult and in spite
of invasions and slaughters, of the art which Alexander's adventurous
successors, the despots of Central Asia, implanted in that once
flourishing land beyond the mountains?

I do not know why it should be so; but there is something -peculiarly
romantic about caravans and the slow commerce of pedestrians. The
spectacle of a hundred laden yaks or ponies is enough to fire the
imagination; of a hundred laden trucks leaves us entirely cold. We
take no interest in the merchant who sends his goods by train; but the
pedestrian merchant seems to us an almost beautiful and heroic figure.
And the aura of romance which surrounded the Tartars was brightened in
our eyes when they showed us their medium of exchange. Diving down
into the recesses of their greasy clothing, they pulled out for our in
spection glittering handfuls of gold. We examined the coins. They were
Russian ten-rouble pieces of before the Revolution, all bright and
new. The head of the Tsar stood sharply out on them, as though they
had but yesterday issued from the Imperial mint.