568
PARTISAN REVIEW
and conscience. Each day the Indians became more various. Moslems
and Hindus and Parsees, northerners and southerners, Bengali and
Maharati, Brahmans and Untouchables, sifted apart like--Englishmen
and Russians and Spaniards.
X
and Y became Jayaprakash, Minoo,
and Kish. But each day the "Europeans" drew closer to a collective
symbol.
Within a week, the difference between Senator McCarthy and
Secretary Acheson had become at most a choice of adverbs. The
President's dismissal of MacArthur, which occurred while we were in
Madras, was the occasion chiefly of surprise that two men with identical
views should have fallen out over some obscure misunderstanding. In
debates and discussions at Bombay, the dozen of us from the West, who
at home (that is, in Paris or New York, London or Rome or Berlin)
differ on nearly every subject that can be stated, were never-though
we neither consulted nor planned together-in more than a moment's
disagreement.
I t was impossible for an American not to sound like-an American.
Long Island's and socialism's Norman Thomas, watching the lovely
Shakuntala Masani dance in the classic Hindu mode, was a Kansas
farmer with even a Kansas drawl. Herman Muller, Nobel geneticist and
one-time colleague of Lysenko, faced with the mud hutments of the
Bombay masses, quivered with the reformist passions of Hull House.
Wystan Auden, for all his poet's renunciation of King and class,
pronounced like a somnambulist, at the end of Shakuntala's cobra-en–
trancing, Siva-seducing dance: "Not my cup of tea."
