67

After his release from prison, so many people came to Gora throughout the day that to remain at home amid that suffocating, endless stream of praises and conversation became impossible for him.

And so Gora once again began his wanderings through the villages, as he had done before.

He would eat something in the morning, leave the house, and not return until late at night. Taking a train to some station near Calcutta, he would make his way into the heart of the village countryside. There he would accept hospitality in the quarters of the oil-pressers, the potters, the fisherfolk, and others of that kind. Why this great fair-complexioned giant of a Brahmin should be wandering about in their homes, inquiring into their joys and sorrows, was something they could make nothing of; indeed, it gave rise to various kinds of suspicion in their minds. But Gora pushed past all their hesitation and mistrust and moved freely among them. Now and again he had heard unpleasant words — yet he was not deterred.

The deeper he penetrated among them, the more one thought kept revolving ceaselessly in his mind. He observed that in these villages the bonds of society were far more rigid than in the educated, genteel world. The eating, sleeping, sitting, and working of every household lay night and day under the unwinking eye of the community. Every person had a perfectly natural and unquestioning faith in established custom — there was no argument about it whatsoever. Yet these bonds of society, this rigorous observance of ritual, gave them not the slightest strength in the arena of practical life. He doubted whether any creatures so timid, so helpless, so incapable of considering their own welfare, existed anywhere else in the world. Beyond the observance of custom, they neither truly recognised nor, when explained to, truly grasped any other form of good. Through punishment, through faction, through prohibition, they had come to understand the forbidding rule as the supreme thing. What must not be done — this injunction, enforced by a thousand kinds of regulation, had so thoroughly enmeshed their very nature from head to foot. But this net was the net of debt, this bondage was the bondage of the moneylender — not the bondage of a king. Within it there was no great unity that could place them side by side in times of adversity or prosperity alike. Gora could not but observe that with the weapon of custom, man was draining man’s blood and reducing him to a merciless destitution. Many a time he had seen that at social ceremonies and observances, no one showed the least mercy to another. A man’s father had suffered from illness for a long time; the poor man had been ruined by medicines and special diet for that father, and had received not the smallest assistance from anyone — and yet the villagers were insisting that the father must undergo a rite of expiation for a chronic illness held to be the result of some unknown transgression. The wretch’s poverty and helplessness were no secret to any of them, yet there was no forgiveness. It was the same in every ceremony of every kind. Just as a police investigation is a graver calamity for a village than a robbery, so too the obsequies following a parent’s death become a more grievous misfortune for a child than the death itself. No one would heed the plea of small means and limited strength; by whatever means, the heartless demands of social propriety must be satisfied to the last fraction. At the occasion of a marriage, every stratagem would be employed by the bridegroom’s side to make the burden upon the bride’s father unbearable — without the slightest compassion for the unfortunate man. Gora saw that this society gave no help in need, no assurance in distress, but only compelled submission through chastisement and drove the helpless into still greater peril.

Gora had forgotten this in the world of educated society. For in that society, there were forces from without that were working to unite people for the general good. Various initiatives for coming together could be seen taking shape in that world. Whether these united endeavours, by being mere imitations of others, might lead us toward futility — that alone remained a matter worth reflecting upon.

But in the villages, where the shock of external forces was not operating in the same way, Gora, amidst that inertia, could see the image of his country’s deeper weakness fully unveiled and unconcealed. Nowhere was there to be seen the religion that gives strength to all — as service, as love, as compassion, as self-sacrifice, as reverence for human beings — that gives vitality and bestows good. What remained was a ritual observance that only drew lines, made divisions, inflicted pain; that refused to acknowledge reason anywhere; that drove even affection away — and this was what blocked and impeded everyone at every turn of their going and coming, their rising and sitting, in every matter of life. In the villages, the harmful consequences of this blind compulsion presented themselves to Gora’s eyes so vividly, in so many varied forms, and he saw how it had assailed people’s health, their understanding, their moral sense, and their capacity for action in so many directions and in so many ways, that it became impossible for him to lull himself into a comfortable reverie.

The first thing Gora noticed was this: among the lower castes of the village — whether on account of the scarcity of women or for whatever other reason — a great deal of money had to be paid in order to obtain a bride, so that many men had to remain unmarried for their whole lives, and many more until a very advanced age. On the other side, there was a strict prohibition against the remarriage of widows. In consequence, the moral health of household after household was being corrupted, and every single member of that society was suffering from this harmful situation and its attendant difficulties. All were bound to bear this perpetual evil, yet in no one’s hands was there any remedy. The very Gora who, in educated society, was unwilling to see the slightest relaxation of custom — that same Gora struck a blow against custom here. He brought the village priests around to his view, but he could not obtain the consent of the community by any means. They grew angry with him; they said, “Very well then — when Brahmins permit widow-remarriage, we too will permit it.”

The principal cause of their anger was this: they believed that Gora was showing contempt for them as a low caste, that he had come to propagate the view that for people of their kind the adoption of an utterly base custom was the proper course.

In his wanderings through the villages, Gora had also observed that among the Muslims there existed the very thing by means of which they could be rallied and united. He had watched carefully and noted that when any trouble or misfortune befell the village, the Muslims would gather together around one another with a closeness and solidarity that the Hindus did not show. Gora had pondered again and again why there should be so great a difference between these two communities, neighbours so close to one another. The answer that arose in his mind was one he was utterly unwilling to accept. To acknowledge it caused pain throughout his whole being — the acknowledgment that the Muslims were united by religion, not by ritual observance alone. On the one side, the bonds of ritual had not shackled all their endeavours in pointless constraint; on the other side, the bonds of religion bound them with a peculiarly deep intimacy. They had collectively embraced something that was not mere negation, but affirmation; not subtractive, but additive — something for which, at a single call, in a single moment, a whole people could stand together and willingly lay down their lives.

When Gora had written, debated, and delivered speeches in educated society, it was in order to persuade others, to draw others to his own path, and he had naturally coloured his words with imagination, giving them a beguiling hue; he had veiled the coarse with subtle interpretation, and had made even that which was no more than superannuated rubble appear in the moonlight of sentiment like an enchanting picture. Because one section of the country was hostile toward the country — because they found fault with everything in it — Gora had striven night and day, out of ardent love for his homeland, to cover everything pertaining to it with a veil of luminous feeling, in order to save it from the indignity of that loveless gaze. This had become his habit of mind. Everything was good; what you call a fault is, from some angle, a virtue — this was not merely what Gora argued like an advocate; it was what he believed with his whole soul. Even in the most impossible circumstances, he had stood alone, holding this belief aloft like a banner of victory with a firm fist before all the ranks of his mocking adversaries. He had but one fixed purpose: to restore to his countrymen their reverence for their own land — and after that, other work.

But when he entered the villages, there were no listeners before him; there was nothing he needed to prove; there was no call to rouse all his opposing energies in order to bring contempt and hostility to their knees — and so in that place he saw truth without any veil whatsoever. The very intensity of his love for his country made his vision of truth uncommonly sharp.