Something of Myself
Friday, May 28, 2004
Some quotes on India
“India was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of India” (Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, 1946, pp37-38).
“For no pen – not even the magic pen of a Kipling or a Mrs.Steel – can convey to a mind unacquainted with the East the subtle atmosphere of India, the awful lifelessness of her vast dun-coloured Plains, the smells and sounds of her swarming cities, the majesty of her incomparable mountains, and the mystery that hangs over the lives and thoughts of many of her peoples” (Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India, 1907, p5).
“In India it is foolish to try and settle which comes first, the owl or the egg. You can’t differentiate cause and effect when both are incomprehensible” (Steel, On The Face of the Waters, p272).
And finally,
“The diversities among the men who ruled India and the contradictions between the various doctrines that they invoked must not make us forget the nature of the system that was set up and eventually had to be abandoned. It was a centralised, enlightened despotism that was transformed in time into an elaborate, autocratic bureaucracy” (Raghavan Iyer, “Utilitarianism and All That”, 1960).
“India was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of India” (Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, 1946, pp37-38).
“For no pen – not even the magic pen of a Kipling or a Mrs.Steel – can convey to a mind unacquainted with the East the subtle atmosphere of India, the awful lifelessness of her vast dun-coloured Plains, the smells and sounds of her swarming cities, the majesty of her incomparable mountains, and the mystery that hangs over the lives and thoughts of many of her peoples” (Maud Diver, The Englishwoman in India, 1907, p5).
“In India it is foolish to try and settle which comes first, the owl or the egg. You can’t differentiate cause and effect when both are incomprehensible” (Steel, On The Face of the Waters, p272).
And finally,
“The diversities among the men who ruled India and the contradictions between the various doctrines that they invoked must not make us forget the nature of the system that was set up and eventually had to be abandoned. It was a centralised, enlightened despotism that was transformed in time into an elaborate, autocratic bureaucracy” (Raghavan Iyer, “Utilitarianism and All That”, 1960).
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