'The Crowd'

It must be nine o’clock in the night when, after dining out, I thought of going to my room. Everywhere there was an unusual excitement, a peculiar exhilaration among the people. It seemed as if some powerful alcoholic drug had stirred the masses to their very depths. Groups of persons were hurrying along the well-lit road; they appeared like dancing bubbles. I had under my arm Tremendous Trifles by G. K. C. which I was reading that day. Although I am not a Christian, I would like to make two confessions. The first is that, however we may try to confess, we cannot confess fully; and the second is, that I have a strong antipathy for a crowd. I shudder to contemplate a crowd; I instinctively shun it. I feel that somehow or other my higher susceptibilities and faculties are smothered under a rampant philistinism. It is ever a puzzle to me how men of parts manage to live in the din and bustle and the sick hurry of great towns. The same difficulty confronts me whenever I go to Bombay, for there one must dive only into the depths of the sea to find a region of silence. Hating feverish industrialism, I chose Poona which is a halfway house between ultra-modern civilisation and barbaric darkness.

When I stepped out, I had exactly these two extremes before me. The external surroundings seemed to be in a jubilant mood, while I was moody. My eyes were dazzled by the intense lights on both sides of the street, but in my mind it was fearfully dark. Men and women, boys and girls, and students of both sexes were in a feverish haste, but my mind was a desolate plain with a ghastly noise of the wind. I had recently seen the crowd wrecking the Bastille in the ‘Tale of Two Cities’; my mind was an underground cell in which I was hugging myself closer and closer. My mind was filled with an uncanny silence, while I was growing more and more impatient with the crowd. My mental state was like that of a man who had a deadly aversion for noise–who hated it, but was persecuted by it.

Thus the two wheels of a cart, the natural surroundings and the mind, instead of acting in unison were pulling in different directions. I can give you a simile for this, that of a cross-eyed man. I was holding fast to my mind and was surreptitiously looking at the passers-by. People of various castes, occupations and creeds were flocking to hear Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s appeal to vote for the Congress. All people were going to the northern corner of the city, while I was the only man going to the south. At that moment I felt that my feet were leaving the ground and I was soaring higher and higher like a bird. From a terrible altitude I saw in my imagination that an enormous crowd had gathered round the northern corner of the city. I wondered whether the equilibrium of the city would not be disturbed. It resembled a huge ant-hill with countless streams of ants flowing towards it. But the fire of my imagination was soon extinguished and I was suddenly precipitated into stern reality.

I thought that people were pointing at me and I felt a bit humiliated. The next moment I was a little cynical at the absence of the nationalist sentiment in me. Even barbers and cobblers were shouting for the Congress; while I apprehended that conscience had made a coward of me–a student of law. I went a little further, and I met my fellow-students, some of whom were girls who were junior to me, hotly discussing political problems. I confess that I felt disconcerted and for a moment ashamed of my usual opinion that politics was ephemeral.

I was looking at the streets and houses, but I did not seethem. Men and women appeared like so many dummies (who were being guided by some transcendental agency). My eyes and ears did not seem to receive anything. I was not conscious where I was going. The subconscious within hated the crowd and propelled me away from it to a place to which every mortal being has to return!

It took some time for me to realise where I was standing. The sight of burning pyres around me, and the noise of breaking skulls, told me that I was standing on the cremation ground. I thought that God was satisfying my morbid craving for silence–for avoiding the crowd–with a vengeance. What a gruesome sight, a man avoiding a crowd of living beings, standing in a crowd of corpses and in pitchy darkness, with the flickering flames of burning corpses to light his face! Imagine a man hating earthly riches but who is made a Shah Jehan and made to live near the Taj Mahal. Imagine a man hating the insufferable heat in the tropics, being placed in the caves of the Himalayas. Imagine a man who wishes to purify himself with a sip of water of the holy Ganges, drowning in the Gangetic floods. Imagine a man hating the crowd, being driven to a cemetery with a crowd of people whose souls have departed!

I could not stand it. I fled to my room.