ABSTRACT
My duties soon brought me within range of Hinduism as a social system, but they did not introduce me to a religion fit to blazon abroad a message to mankind. Not that this troubled me. I was content to affect an air of condescending amusement about the whole thing. I smiled at the thought of adult Hindus sucking up to a god who has an elephant’s head with a broken tusk, a fat paunch and a cheerful disposition—the very spit of the adored, battered jumbo we once had in the nursery—and even petitioning him to remove obstacles in his capacity as Master of Snags, Vighneshwar, each time they set out for the railway station. I was an Englishman ‘Out East’, and did not share the propensity of a certain West to swallow the syrup administered by the gifted apologists of whom Rabindranath Tagore was prince. My mother, on the other hand, was of those on whom the propaganda worked; and toured India for a year-and-a-half armed with that copy of Gitanjali which I have listed in my introductory chapter as being among the few of my possessions not destined to perish in the flames at Gower Street. A waste of breath to tell mother that Tagore had sized up his public, was interpreting Hinduism in Western terms which were alien to it; was anyhow an eclectic; to tell her that his school at Shantineketan, guaranteed to instil an instant appreciation of the divine, was rivalled by another institution, also in Bengal, but more unsavoury: namely, the Temple of Mali at Calcutta, reeking and slippery with blood. Of course, and I admitted it, if you listened to him singing, say, his hymn to the Distant Goddess, full marks.
I know thee, I know thee, O thou Bideshini; thou dwellest on the other shore of the ocean. I have seen thee in the autumn, I have felt thee in the spring night. I have found thee in the midst of my heart, O thou Bideshini. Putting my ear to the sky I have heard thy music…I have roamed through the world and have come at last into the strange country. Here I am, a guest at thy door, O thou Bideshini.
