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VICTOR ANANT
imaginations at that time, or the loss in vigor of the exploratory
mind. Bertolt Brecht has said: Unhappy the land that has no
heroes; no, unhappy the land that has need of heroes. To which
an Indian of my time may add: Unhappy the hero who has no
nation; no, unhappy the hero who has need of a nation. Exclusive
participation in the quest for nationhood thus stifled all desire
to discover ourselves, blinded us to the excitement and danger to be
experienced in the search for self-hood. We went around like
people without underwear, wearing just a large, communal great–
coat. We were completely devoid of any sense of intimacy with our–
selves. There was no need to define ourselves because questions of
personal morality never even arose. Instead, we joined in a nation–
wide moral mudbath. Or, alternatively, we simply left it to Gandhi
who, by his periodic fasts, undertook to cleanse the national soul.
Another mark of this non-individual basis of our lives was the
habit to turn into abstract terms any particular question. Nothing
was specific. We used to sit around in coffee houses, those dens of
communal fantasy-making, talking for hours about "democratic
socialism and communism," "ends and means," "English or Hindi
as the lingua franca"; or just talking; dabbling in the cosmos
without knowing the ground on which we stood; drawing up
charters for a world religion; or making various formulae for one
world. In the evenings we would return to our suburban houses
mentally too exhausted to observe the fascinating complexities
of our bourgeois lives which should have been our only real
starting point.
The result of this kind of abstruseness is best summed up
by what happened to an Indian mystic friend of mine who com–
mutes now between the pink gin and champagne salons of liter–
ary London and the cold, hard floor of a guru's ashram in India.
He was commissioned by an American publisher to write a
sociological study of India after independence. He was paid a
large advance in dollars. About a year later he submitted a manu–
script which began, "India does not exist and I do not exist. This
being the Nature of Reality .. ." and elaborated upon this theme
in a hundred thousand utterly incomprehensible words. The manu–
script
came back with a letter which said, "Since India does not
exist and you do not exist, the contract does not exist, and the
