Gleanings

Rabindranath Tagore on Indian History

The Viswabharati Quarterly May-July, 1943 publishes portions of an address delivered by RABINDRANATH TAGORE in July 1927, under the heading “Greater India,” translated from Bengali by Dr. Kalidas Nag. The following is an extract from it:

In early life I began reading the so-called history of India. From day to day was inflicted upon me the torture of cramming the name dates of the dismal chronicle of India’s repeated defeats and humiliation’s in her political competition with foreigners from Alexander to Clive. In that historical desert of indignities, we tried desperately to satisfy intense hunger for national glorification, out of the slender harvest of the oasis of the Rajput Chivalry. It is known to all with what a feverish excitement we tried in those days to press into our service Tod’s Annals of Rajasthan to enrich our Bengali poetry, drama and romance. That clearly showed how direly we had been starving in the process of discovering the true greatness of our country, which was not a mere geographical expression but a vast continent of human aspirations and character. The external nature of our country, no doubt, builds our body, but our character grows with the inspiration we derive from the world of human aspirations; and if we know that world to be petty and low, then we earn no strength to dispel our depression of spirit, merely by reading the history of the heroic nations that are foreigners.

Art in Schools

It may interest educationists in other parts of India, to know effort is being made in Bengal to introduce “Picture Hours in the Schools” with the help of colour post-cards of famous masterpieces of paintings–a very effective, yet a cheap apparatus of study suitable for conditions prevailing in India. I have just finished a series of an intensive course of lectures on the History of Art for the benefit of a group of Art-teachers at the Calcutta University, almost exclusively illustrated with a series post-cards representing significant Masterpieces of Art of all the Schools.

But the Calcutta University’s humble efforts to train a small band of Art-teachers to take up duties in schools to develop interest in Art appreciative and creative, appear to pale into insignificance in comparison with the greater achievement of the Travancore University in send formidable battalion of 320 graduates, with L.T., degrees, to take up strategic positions in Schools to vanquish the prevailing ignorance of Art and to make our students art-minded. But the great problem is to provide these teachers with the necessary arms, implements, and apparatuses, for Art is a subject which cannot be talked about, but has to be demonstrated, at each step, by visual examples. Before every School has its Gallery of Pictures it is impossible even for trained teachers to accomplish much. Yet the beginnings have to be laid in the Schools, for long before the school boy matriculates and comes to his University, his hunger for beauty is starved out by our too much bookish education.–(O. C. GANGULY in the Modern Review–August, l943.)

Music in Modern China.

It is remarkable to observe that singing lessons are given to nearly every private and public organisation. In every such organisation a chorus band of selected singers is formed. In case any organisation is too poor to afford a big gathering hall, its members stand together in an open space, with the written songs posted on a wall, or in case a wall is not available, on a wooden board. Singing is no longer a classroom monopoly. On every street corner, in great or small cities of Free China, on every day from morning till evening, in every public meeting, rural or urban, singing voices are heard. A European, who escaped from Hongkong, recently came to India, and told me that during his two months’ travel through the provinces of Kwangung, Kwangsi, Kweiyang and Yunnan, in every town he visited he heard the rich volume of mass singing which he had never heard before. “It is,” he said, “the voice of New China.”

Such Success is due largely to the personal inspiration of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It perhaps sounds strange to you that such a minor thing as singing has to be taken care of by a national leader. But it is a fact. As a soldier he knows how great is the value of military songs to an army, and how much greater it would be to the people as a whole. As a classical scholar he knows that vocal science is a branch of old Chinese culture which had been frequently emphasized by Confucius, as one of the two basic means of successful political administration, and worth while reviving, In the Central Training Corps at Chungking, of which the Generalissimo himself is the President, and at which he lectures at least twice a week to the members who are high military or civil officers of  various parts and departments of the country, a class of Teachers of Music and Singing had been set up. Two hundred trained teachers are pouring out from it every half-year, thus Supplying sufficiently the demand of singing China.–(LIN YIH-LING in the course of an article  “China’s cultural Front” in the Calcutta Review, September 1943.)

Oriental and Occidental Pandits.

DR. BHAGAVAN DAS, in the course of an article on “Modern Indian Renaissance and Eastern Religions and Western Thought” (Sir Radhakrishnan’s book) in the Journal of the Benares Hindu University, has the following:

The later works of the ‘new’ (navya) Vedanta (Metaphysic), Nyaya (logic) Mimamsa (Ethic, Exegetic, and Jurisprudence), and even Vyakarana (grammar), are over-full of barren logic-chopping, tiresomely smart hair-splitting, verbal juggling, intellectual acrobatics, heavy pedantry. If there is any usefulness in them at all, it is that they make the clever student’s mind more nimble, supple, strong; even as physical gymnastics, the muscles……

This perverse development of philosophy, in the direction of arid logomachy and mystifying jargon, is far from absent in even the modern scientific west. One small instance will suffice. Some two years ago, I happened to pick up a volume of the well-known Home University Library, entitled Recent Philosophy, by John Laird (pub. 1936). I glanced through the Introduction. It was brightly written. I proceeded to read the rest. I found the brightness marred more and more frequently, as the pages went past, by sudden emergencies of strange, dark, even fearful, words. I began to note these down on the fly-leaves. At the end, the number of those ending in ‘ism’ amounted to one hundred and twenty-one, each different from the others. And I had probably missed jotting down some others. What does the reader think of ‘heuristicism’, ‘aporeticism,’ ‘synechism,’ ‘tychism,’ ‘eidetic phenomenologism,’ ‘absolutistic normative ethicalism,’ ‘noodicism,’ logistical positivism,’ ‘subjective transubjectivism’ and ‘glottologicalism,’ and ‘gignomenologism!’ Besides the ‘isms,’ there were some equally amazing ‘ologies’ and ‘ogonies,’ f. i., ‘axiology,’ ‘psychomegathology,’ and ‘heterogony.’ The Samskrit vada is an exact equivalent of ‘ism’ and ‘ology’; can be tacked on to any word; and has been, to many scores; yielding as many formidable words, which have neither earthly nor heavenly use. On no page of Laird’s book was there any mention of any connection between any of these astonishing words and views, supposed to be ‘philosophy,’ and human welfare and social structure; except one, in which there was a passing reference to Marx’s ‘dialectical materialism’ and the now famous ‘isms,’ Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.