THE HYPNOTIZED PEOPLE
315
question of paying you the balance does not exist. We are so deeply
moved by your revelation that from now on you may be assured
we do not exist for you. In fact, at this rate we wonder how we
could exist for anybody at all." My friend sighed as he said to
me: "The West will never understand
maya.
It is too materialistic."
I have described all this in some detail to show why, with
independence, in 1947, my generation in particular was unable to
respond heroically to the moral confusion that was soon to prevail.
We were ready to disintegrate because we were wholly unprepared
for the shock of self-recognition. It was as if a huge fog had lifted
and in the dazzling clarity of the aftermath we saw ourselves as we
had never imagined possible, each with distinctly separate un–
recognizeable faces. Our pathetic inability to create a moral order
to live by was brought into sharp focus by three catastrophic events
which came soon after independence.
The first was when, as a result of partition (never accepted
by our leaders for what it was, a recognition of the British as–
sumption that there were two Indias, Muslim and Hindu, but
slurred over as a political compromise), the frontier areas be–
tween Pakistan and Indian erupted in savage scenes of murder,
arson, loot and destruction unparallelled in Indian history. The
second was the assassination of Gandhi, a man whom every Indian
deified. The third was the shocking use of military force against
the native states of
J
unagadh and Hyderabad and against the
raiders in Kashmir. Suddenly we saw our nakedness. Our moral
complacency (or national consciousness) was nothing more than a
series of superficial lies. But what private means did we have to
hide our shame? What was the meaning of being an Indian?
For the first time we saw the cause and consequence of our
laziness. The contradictions smouldering underneath the surface,
the contr.adictions ignored by us, had already slowly drained us
of all daring, of all creative impulses. We realized we had been
living until then on an
ad hoc
basis, taking what we could from
the petty-cash boxes of two different cultures and were suddenly
confronted with our bankruptcy. Where could we find the cultural
capital needed to respond to the challenge that freedom had
brought in its wake?
