MODERN INDIA

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 35, 5 November 1928, Page 3

MODERN INDIA

DISILLUSIONED SANSKRIT SCHOLAR A frank confession of disillusionment has been made by Mr. Ernest Horrwitz, an American Sanskrit scholar, who went to India to deliver a course of lectures in Bombay University, and afterwards travelled for some months. Writing in the “Times of India,” he says that he expected a country of mystery and romance, but found it, from the Chinese to the Afghan borders, utterly prosaic, illiterate, and impoverished. He says the Hindus have inherited a great cultural past without being able to assimilate or vitalise it. The Muses have deserted an inartitstlc land, and the Bengal revival of poetry, painting, acting, and dancing is but a copy of modern Western art and often cf an inferior type. Mr. Horrwitz found that many learned Sanskrit experts lacked literary taste or judgment and were appallingly uncritical. He considers, also, that Indian young men are unable to compete In efficiency and outlook with their fellow rivals in Europe and America. He particularly calls attention to the Indian villages, which he describes as the most neglected on earth. Turning to other subjects, Mr. Horrwitz says that Indian cooking is barbarous and primitive, and the cook, the kitchen, and the utensils in most cases are unspeakably filthy and unequal to providing drinkable . tea or eatable bread. Vegetables and cereals as prepared in Indian kitchens have no nutritive value; fruit is very poor, and no country supplies worse dairy products. “The joys and comforts of life are absent from India; the people are gloomy and indifferent to beauty and soul thrills.”

Mr. Horrwitz says he often heard the excuse that this was all the fault of alien rule, on which he comments that Swaraj will never issue from the Hindus and can only come from England or through world forces. He quotes an Afghan fellow-traveller as saying that when India is left to herself the Afghans will annex Kashmir and Sind and create a greater Afghanistan. “Wo Sanskritists of the West sit at the feet of the venerable sages of old,” he adds, “but modern India has to learn from us. She cannot teach the West anything, not even .Gfmdhi aand Tagore/*