Weak lungs, the doctors say, are bad for nerves. One day, however, I showed Lakshmi the door.
‘You think Savithri would have married you? Oh my God how many men she has turned round her sari-fringe and thrown to the elephants. You men will never understand us women — especially Indian women. Savithri would rather any day have wed a fat, spitting, nautch-girl, cricket-club Maharaja, or a rich banya like her sister did — he is a banya, though he may be a minister now — than an intellectual like you, Ramaswamy, a Brahmin. Today in India you can buy anything for rupees.’
‘Then I shall grow rich and buy myself a wife,’ I said, and kept very silent. Lakshmi looked into my books, fingered them, read a line or two here and there, rose up and tucked me in, looked through the window, laughed and said:
‘Oh, the English, this race of shopkeepers! They will crown a queen with one hand and count the dollars in the other. They gave Independence to India because it suited the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the great Board of Trade.’
‘I am a monarchist,’ I said, quietly, pertinently, ‘and I honour the queen.’
‘Funny thing to hear from an Indian,’ she protested, rising and adjusting her scarf round her neck. I waited for her to put on her heavy overcoat. She had bought it in Prague, she said: ‘It is so cheap, yet it is made of the best Astrakhan.’
‘I belong to the period of the Mahabharata,’ I said. ‘I have nothing to do with the Board of Trade.’
She understood, and left me. She did not come to see me for several weeks. She sent a postcard from Cambridge saying she was busy with her final exams. It suited me that exams were in the summer, and I could go on dreaming of the coronation of kings.
In a month mirie,
Septembre Begynning,
Baudwynn of Canterbirie
Come to couronne the Kyng.
I started reading Coomaraswamy — that son of an Indian father and a delightful English mother, who characteristically enough spent most of his time in Boston, and eventually died there. The Anglo-Saxon mind does not understand India very well; the best interpreters of India in the West have been mostly French (I am thinking mainly of Sénart, Levi, Guénon, Grousset, Masson-Oursel, Pryzulski); there have been a few Germans, but very few British. And yet when you have writers like Sir William Jones, Sir John Woodroffe — more Brahmin than any Brahmin — and Coomaraswamy, you feel grateful for those exceptional Englishmen. Even so, it cannot be that the Anglo-Saxon mind understands India so little, but possibly some shy kink in the British strain is frightened of what they name ‘the imponderables’ for who could be more Anglo-Saxon than Thoreau, Emerson, or even Whitman. This Boston Brahmin, Ananda Coomaraswamy, was more of a smartha, a true, an orthodox Indian than some tottering old President of the Indian National Congress. India would never be made by our politicians and professors of Political Science, but by these isolate existences of India, in which India is rememorated, experienced and communicated; beyond history, as tradition, as the Truth. Anybody can have the geographic— even the political — India; it matters little. But this India of Coomaraswamy, who will take it away, I ask you, who? Not Tamurlane or even Joseph Stalin.
Woman is the earth, air, ether, sound; woman is the microcosm of the mind, the articulations of space, the knowing in knowledge; the woman is fire, movement clear and rapid as the mountain stream; the woman is that which seeks against that which is sought. To Mitra she is Varuna, to Indra she is Agni, to Rama she is Sita, to Krishna she is Radha. Woman is the meaning of the word, the breath, touch, act; woman, that which reminds man of which he is, and reminds herself through him of that which she be. Woman is kingdom, solitude, time; woman is growth, the gods, inherence; the woman is death, for it is through woman that one is born; woman rules, for it is she, the universe. She is the daughter of the earth, the queen, and it is to her that elephant and horse, camel, deer, cow, and peacock bow that she reign on us, as in some medieval Book of Hours where she is clad in the blue of the sky; all the animals and worlds surround her, and praise her that she be. The world was made for celebration, for coronation, and indeed even when the king is crowned it is the queen to whom the kingdom comes—lactur gens anglica Domini imperio regenda et reginae virtutis Providentia gubernanda — for even when it is a king that rules, she is the justice, the bender of man in compassion, the confusion of kindness, the sorrowing in the anguish of all. Woman is the duality made for her own pools of mirroring and she crowns herself to show that man is not of this kingdom. Man cannot even die. Then must he absorb himself into himself and be being. The coronation is the adieu of man to the earth. Be gay, earth, be beautiful, for man must go.
Woman is the world. Woman is the earth and the cavalcade, the curve of the cloud, and the round roundness of the sun. Woman is the space between mansions; those, secret, knowing emptinesses from which word goes from house to house and man to man. It is woman that looks out of the window and sees herself in the other, looks at the mirror and sees the light, looks at man and sees her high God; she touches the down of her hair in Piccadilly, and dreams of a world where all is spring, all flowers moving as in the waters, birds.
Woman will sit in a coach and see herself as seen by others; she will wear the tiara and know she is no woman nor known being; she will dream of orb and dove, of annum and bacculum, of garter and of the knights; and she will think of the Abbey, where she will see herself as seen by a thousand years. Woman after woman has sat on the same seat, and has counted the same beads of love. Woman will be on the coin of England, woman will sound as silver all over the world, women will go round the world and bring the warmth of tenderness to many homes. Many a maid the world over, will marry the young man with the red scarf, for the queen, the queen will walk through the streets of Adelaide, and will bless the hearts of the chemist’s assistant, the minister’s daughter, the paralytic at the window. Woman will wander the seas, mount the stairways of many a palace and parliament, for woman is the only meaning of silence over the seas. In the little alleys in London, by parks and by pools, simple virgin grass grew all like words of a saying, and many a child played rejoicing on its birth, for the world would be handed over to a queen.
Time flowed, and on barques and balustrades man stopped a moment and lived in his own presence. Everything: the towers, the trolley-bus-stops; the zebra crossings and their orange lights, the horses of vegetable sellers with their short, restless tails; the electric company’s cockney meter-reader; the leaves of eager trees brushed aside, the newspapers rags that floated on the air; the curse at the pubs, the songs of the Italians; all showed that there was much drink in the air and much sunshine. Men came from all over the globe: the Abyssinians with their curled hair and their white, long togas; the Zambezi Zulus with their split noses and their large masticating faces; the Pakistani’s on their white, slim horses; the humble Hindu in his proud tights; the Japanese lady with her large smile; the Togo-islanders, the Canadians, the hearty loud-spoken Australians; the French with their indiscretions, the Germans with their boasts: yes, even the Soviets came to drink of the beer of England. Fruit came parcelled from all the three corners of the world, from Malaya and from British Honduras; peat from the Falklands, pearls from many seas. Kings and pashas came from everywhere, the lost race of a defeated people, who wanted to know, if knowing will want them from wanting; a great many students and professors came; journeymen to beg or sell; and married couples to believe that one can live one’s life and find the meaning of connection in round freedom.