পারস্য-যাত্রী/পরিশিষ্ট/আলাপ-আলোচনা
(পৃ. ১৫৩-১৬৫)
আলাপ-আলোচনা
২৫ এপ্রিল ১৯৩২
ইম্ফাহানে পত্রিকা সম্পাদকদের সহিত আলোচনা
Question: After welcoming you, sir, to this land which holds you in high honour, may we be permitted to ask whether you have so far enjoyed your tour in this country?
Poet: Your country is beautiful and your hospitality is overwhelming. I have had a most enjoyable time in all the places I have visited.
Question: Has the beauty and as you kindly put it, the hospitable nature of our people, had any effect yet on your thoughts and writings?
Poet: I am gathering inspiration; I am sure when I leave Persia I shall carry home within my heart experiences which will be of permanent value to me. As yet I have seen only a few places in your country—Bushire is a port town situated practically in a desert, yet with great care you have preserved some gardens within it. Shiraz is lovely with birds, blossoms, trees and its springtime climate which I enjoyed very much. In Khalil-Abad garden I used to watch the purple outline of the hills in the background; the shady trees gave me rest.
Question: We know you visited the tombs of Saadi and Hafez.
Poet: Those experiences have gone deep into my heart. You know I had my first introduction to Hafez through my father who used to recite his verses to me. They seemed to me like a greeting from a far away poet who was yet near to me.
তেহেরান। ৩ মে ১৯৩২
কয়েকজন শিক্ষাবিদের সহিত আলোচনা
Poet: I am glad to meet you here today and have this opportunity of discussing with you about some fundamental principles of education which we owe it to the modern generation to establish in our educational institutions. To me the most important issue seems to be the task of widening the mental horizon of the students, of imparting to their studies the background of internationalism which will enable them to realize the true character of our interlinked humanity and the deeper unities of our civilizations in the West and the East.
Educator I: I express on behalf of my colleagues and myself our profound thankfulness to you for reviving in your educational colony the spirit of internationalism which is the spirit of Asia.
This spirit as you know, sir, is not foreign to our Persian civilization. In the olden days Shapur’s University was a refuge for students of Rome who met with no racial bias from our people when they flocked round our teachers for knowledge. After the invasion of the Arabs, in the Nizamic schools we had Jewish, Arab and Assyrian students. Our educational traditions have consistently maintained this supernational attitude in all matters relating to quest of truth. It is because of this tradition which we yet carry in our blood that we can accept your great message with an open heart.
Poet: I rejoice to hear that you share with me a deep faith in cultural federation between different peoples and races. In India we have offered hospitality to various indigenous and foreign cultures and attempted to evolve our own civilization by assimilating influences from far and wide. It is only now that in our artificial universities we have gone in wholly for parrot-like repetition, in imitation that is uncritical, in memorising lessons without using our own initiative of mind and courage of judgment. It produces eternal schoolboys who gather informations that never ripen into true knowledge and wisdom.
My dream is to offer to our students a continental background of mind, a background in which have been coordinated the experiences of ages, the intellectual and spiritual experiments made in Asia for long generations.
Europe has evolved a continental culture which is like a common coffer to which the different peoples of Europe contribute their best gifts. Owing to this collaboration Europe has become great. She has successfully exploited the rich potentialities of her peoples and come to the forefront in the march of life. Asia too must reorganise her continental life and vitalize her scattered cultures by recognising their affinities and expressing them in literature, arts, science and civic life. Barriers of national segregation must be broken through, superstitions of religions and social incompatibility must be relentlessly fought against. In a daring quest of all that lies deepest in our common humanity Asia must unite and hold out her hands to the West in friendly cooperation.Educator 2: Sir, we are sure that your hopes will be justified because a whole civilization expresses its deepest needs, its greatest fulfilment through its men of genius. A prophet is the product of circumstance, appearing at a critical period of a country’s history. Now all the great nations of Asia are thinking of their past glories, they are waking up to their responsibility, to their national inheritance. They are seeking a great message which will ignite their dormant consciousness and bring about an illumination of their fullest personality. You appear, sir, as a prophet and spokesman of Asia’s great dreams, through you we are beginning to realize the nature of the work which we educators have before us. Though we get your message through the unsatisfying medium of translation, your noble physiognomy and the music of your speech bring it very near to our soul.
Poet: We must no longer be satisfied with isolated domestic lamps, we must have a festival of lights which will express the effulgence of our humanity in Asia and justify us before the modern age. Otherwise we can never hope to be recognised by the world at large, we shall remain obscure, and the bondage of obscurity is the worst form of slavery that can shackle a nation. We must gain freedom, freedom which is a gift of self-expression, not an opportunity for self-indulgence in material comforts. During our great past our free peoples sent their torch-bearers to different countries to carry the radiant message of love, of great thoughts and deeds, to acquaint their neighbouring peoples with the highest realizations of their seers and sages. Asia in those days had the freedom of soul to bestow and to accept all that she considered great and enduring; it is that highest form of freedom which we must today win for our coming generations by opening up through an education of complete life the richest potentialities of their character. This education of a complete life involves training to recognise the kinship of our common humanity through a correct reading of history, of science, of the arts, in the light of man’s spiritual truth.
Utilitarian education has its value, but it is deprived of all significance if in its fragmentary pursuit of narrow immediate ends it fails to arouse in the mind of students the impulse of larger purposes, of aspirations which comprehend the fulness of our personality. In the East we must never forget to link up our educational institutions with the fundamental values of our undivided spiritual life, because that has been the greatest mission of our ancient universities, which, as you have said, in spite of political vicissitudes, never allowed their vision of humanity to be darkened by racial considerations. Asia owes it to humanity to restore her spirit of generous cooperation in culture and heal the suffering peoples of the modern age now divided by cruel politics and materialistic greed which vitiate even the citadels of education.
In order to have this intermingling of minds in Asia we must rid our minds that are dark and against reason, of all the aberrations of local history that repel others and with a spirit of intellectual detachment seek out the treasures that have universal value.Educator I: Material progress is essential but it must know its limits. You have made wonderfully clear to us today our task as educators to inspire our students with a correct sense of values which may be described as the one great purpose of education. Every student of history knows how nations have perished either from dire paucity of material needs or from a surfeit of them. The East and the West, roughly speaking, present before us today a spectacle of these two extreme conditions. Europe by concentrating on material achievement has exploited nature and man at the expense of her soul. She has evolved a unity of civilization because of the urge of a common purpose which has permeated her continental life. But that is not enough—the results are too evident to need explanation. Asia still retains the vision of a synthetic cultural life where the good is the good of our whole nature, of all the peoples;—but as you have made evident to us now, failing to establish her ideals on the basis of a united, a continental civilization, she has become ineffective.
Sir, you have raised the banner of Asia’s self-expression, your ideas of education are a new revelation to the modernage. We are proud that through you our continent offers to all humanity the promise of a new path which will lead us out of the debris of the present, out of all the delusions and oppressions which insult our human nature and bring us into mutual conflict. You can be assured that we shall never forget your message, that our renascent nation will strive its utmost to put your ideas into effective operation.
Poet: I thank you for your sympathy and your faith which strengthen my hopes for the future. Our institution in Bengal depends on your cooperation for its success. We must keep in touch with each other and be guided by the experiences we both gain in our efforts to train the minds of the young towards a fellowship of culture which will bring humanity together in love and understanding.
—cf New Asia (1947), pp 1-5
ইরানের বিধানসভার জনৈক সদস্যের সহিত
কবির আলোচনা
Poet: My time in Persia is coming to an end. I have not been here for long, yet I do not feel like a stranger. It is surprising that though I do not know your language somehow I have come very close to you and can easily communicate with you and feel the warmth of your friendship. There is not much difference between your people and ours, the general outlook on life and temperament seems to be very much akin.
Dashty: Languages are after all secondary; of primary importance is our psychological make-up which manifests itself directly through the medium of gestures and expressions.
You told me in Bushire that you have come to us in Persia to discover the old India. Quite true, our real spirit is old Indian; it comes from a past when we shared a common culture. Even now an inner affinity persists, and it is this that makes you feel at home with us.
Poet: Yes, the path was open for me before I was born. As a matter of fact, in our home in Bengal the spirit of Iran was a living influence when I was a child. My revered father and my elder brothers were deeply attached to Persian mystical literature and art. Going further back one discovers that at one time the Bengali language freely borrowed words from your vocabulary which we use now without knowing their origin. When you find this, you must know that something of your culture flows through our daily life; for words are merely symbols of thoughts and attitudes which they represent. Even before the Mohamedan rule in India there was active cultural interchange between India and Iran; in our classical art and literature direct traces of this are to be discovered.
I do not indeed find your life and habits at all unfamiliar, it is very easy for me to adjust myself to your ways and to realise your spirit.
Dashty: I hope we have not tired you too much. We all wanted to see you and get the inspiration of your personality. It has not been possible for us to spare you as much as we should have done.
Poet: You know, that is what I wanted. I had been longing to meet different groups of your people, to know individuals irrespective of their vocation, their station in life. I confess that sometimes the strain of engagements has told on my health but I have never minded this. It has been a great inspiration for me to meet your people to converse with them on present-day affairs in Persia which are of vital interest to us.
A Gentleman: Have you already started a centre of Persian culture in your university in Bengal?
Poet: Yes, because I have always felt that it is necessary for us both to know each other, not only because of our common ancestry but because there is something in your literature and art which deeply appeals to us. The Persian temperament is poetic, you love music and merry conversation, you share our love for nature’s beauty.
If you were rigidly pious ‘Mullahs’ corresponding to our Hindu priests, we could not have dared to invite you. Unfortunately two of our biggest communities in India have yet too many representatives of this type of bigotry and that is why we cannot come together. I claim the collaboration of your scholars and artists whose influence will unite us culturally and modify our differences which are not really fundamental
Dashty: How do you like Persian music?
Poet: Very much indeed. Some of your recent innovations I do not fully understand. It seems to me that they have not yet been fully assimilated by the native genius of your music. They are too reminiscent of Europe; in any case, they do not move me so much as your classical music.
Dashty: We are of the same opinion. We feel that the introduction of harmony is too recent to have successfully enriched our music; but may be gradually we shall evolve a music which will be all the more beautiful because of these innovations.
Poet: It must be so. You have all along had a wonderful gift of assimilating influences from outside and coming out more fully with the expression of your own unique culture. In music too you are sure to gain by European influence. I have always felt sad that European music has not had any direct influence on our own, that great European composers such as Beethoven have, unlike great European poets or philosophers, wielded little or no influence on Eastern cultural movements. For European music is unquestionably great and without doubt our own music will be all the richer if it can absorb, into its living texture, creative influences from European music.
Dashty: I am one of those who believe that Persia should assimilate 100 per cent of American culture. I am not afraid of foreign influence; indeed, I believe, that nothing can radically change our temperament, so that we may safely go in for Americanization. We shall then be American in our methods but thoroughly Persian in our culture. I believe you try to follow the same principle in Santiniketan.
Poet: The time has come when we must think deeply about human civilization. You must have read Spengler’s book on European civilization. It raises searching questions about the destiny of the modern Western civilization and gives us dangerous parallelism from history.
When you speak of hundred per cent Americanization you must remember that America herself is faced today with an imminent crisis and has yet to achieve a stability which will prove the soundness of her social and political machinery.
I was talking today to a German scientist—Dr. StratilSauer of Leipzig—who has come here all the way from Berlin by motor car for geological exploration, and he was telling me the same thing about Europe. The whole Western civilization is undergoing a severe trial. The reckless mechanization of life which has gone on in the West is already having a drastic reaction.
We in the East must ponder seriously before we go in for hasty imitation of Western life in its totality. There is a profound maladjustment somewhere at the very basis of European life. Everywhere there is a material well-being but happiness has vanished. And how could it be otherwise? Pierce through the veneer of modernity and you find almost primitive barbarism staring at you. What is high-pressure modern life for the multitude but a ceaseless preoccupation with physical needs—a hot pursuit of dress, expensive cars, elaborate food and housing, that is to say, of materials which satisfy the elementary needs of our animal existence? Such a life has no time for self-realization, for human fellowship, for all that make man’s existence significant and precious. Certainly, this is the modern form of barbarism which exhausts all its resources merely to climb up the steep summit of living surrounded by emptiness.Dashty: Our soul accepts what it may; we cannot determine consciously how much to receive or reject exactly. The whole process of assimilation is a subconscious one so that there is perhaps no fear of only outside influence totally submerging or exterminating the basic character of our civilization. If we try to profit by American modes of life and hold them before our people we shall probably adopt only a few of them and that will be all to our benefit. Greek ideals, for example, have left their legacy in the great architecture and sculpture of India; but at the beginning of Greek influence we would probably have feared that India was doing harm to its traditions by accepting Greek motifs and technique to experiment upon. In Persia similarly we have had periods of extraneous influence but this has only vitalised our Persian genius. We have quickly shaken off the imitative phase and retained something from it which have helped us.
Poet: Why then do you emphasize upon American modes of life and how can you isolate and specify a particular country when you want the healthy contact of science, which is neither American nor Western but universal in its truth? I am not condemning America in particular but only pointing out that when you say you want to imitate a particular country or people you can only copy things and external facts, you cannot assimilate truths which lie at the foundation of our human character. If any nation or a people have been successful in giving shape to ideals which are of perennial value, what we have to learn from them is their capacity to absorb and establish these ideals; we must not merely copy the results that others have produced. That is my point—I am not against absorbing truths which are of universal value; as a matter of fact, it is our human birthright to claim such truths as our own. But I am against borrowing ready-made models or emphasizing upon the need of imitating isolated external facts which are particular to a particular race or a nation. Let our emphasis be on Truth, not on particular facts which have had their special evolution under inevitable local circumstances.
Dashty: I quite agree. I mentioned America as an example.
Poet: The German scientist told me that Europe is sick of her mechanised high-speed life which adds materials but fails to satisfy the soul. As a result of this, there are many of them who seek out remote spots where they can forget the rush and fever of a purposeless existence; they go to the South Sea Islands, Madagascar, Middle Africa and so on where they can wash themselves clean of Western ways of living. He told me of a great Leipzig professor who gave up his scientific work and all that he held dear in his life to search for inner peace which he found in a Tibetan monastery. It may be a reaction but it indicates very grave problems which the modern age can no longer ignore. In Darmstadt, after the War, German students with pale emaciated faces used to flock round me and ask: ‘Sir, we have lost faith in our teachers, they have misled us. What shall we do with our lives?’ They expected an Eastern poet to give them something which would satisfy their spiritual hunger, some philosophy of life which the Western world needed for its salvation.
Dashty: Yes, we must work to bring the Western Spirit of Science and the Eastern Philosophy of Life together. Materially we must be secure, spiritually we must develop our human wealth of character.
Poet: That is what I say. We must get out of the tangle of doctrines and the infatuation of material results in order to achieve a balanced harmony of life which, as you indicate, takes cognizance of our complete human personality comprehending the physical as well as the spiritual aspects of our nature. This harmony, however, can never be established unless we have sufficient detachment of mind to judge for ourselves, to minister to the essential and reject all that is ephemeral and delusive in building the foundation of our national life. It would be fatal if we surrender our critical faculty to a mood of indiscriminate emulation. We in the East, however poor we may now be materially, must reserve the right of judging what we consider to be beneficial or not for humanity, of selecting for ourselves a path which suits the evolution of our civilization. By exercising this right of judgment we shall not only be serving our own country but do our inescapable duty to the whole world of humanity of which we form a part.
Dashty: We thank you, Sir, for your words of wisdom which, we assure you, we shall treasure in the depths of our life.
—New Asia (1947), pp 5-12