India Remembered (Second Edition) by Percival Spear

Author:Percival Spear [Spear, Percival]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9788125053231
Publisher: Orient Blackswan Private Limited
Published: 2013-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

Concluding Reflections

I

left India seventeen years ago but India has never left me. No one can tell beforehand how anyone will react to India. There are some who take an instant dislike to the whole scene and are restless and unhappy until they can leave. They will then become normal and balanced again and live happily ever after. If you find yourself in that class when you get there (you cannot tell beforehand), the sooner your leave it the better, for you will do no good to yourself or the inhabitants as long as you stay. Half a lifetime's residence will make no difference to your attitude or feelings; you will only seem to others to be more and more difficult and crusty. Then there are those on whom the country just seems to make no impression at all. They will do their work, they will adjust themselves to the conditions, they will make friends and inspire affection and respect in their circle, whether English or Indian. But all the time their souls, as it were, will be somewhere else, so that when the time comes to depart they will slough off the Indian experience as if it had never been. They will return to English life as a duck returns to water and you would soon never know that they had been there. None of the vain regrets for them that the Indian expatriate is supposed to feel. These people lack neither imagination, goodwill nor ability. It is just that the Indian scene seems to strike no responsive chord in their hearts and kindles no fire while the soul muses. An occultist would say that they have no pre-connection with India. And then there are those who, once they have settled in the country, find that there is something which draws them and holds them, something from which there is no escape. Approval in itself is no key to this state of mind; abuses fascinate even while they are condemned and horrors grip while they horrify. Still less have political opinions anything to do with it. It may affect the sternest die-hard as the other states of mind may afflict the most convinced supporter of Indian liberty. It is, in fact, a state of mind and neither a condition of opinion nor a phase of feeling. For it will continue however your opinions may change, and haunt you whatever your state of feeling. I would call it some sort of affinity in the soul, which once realised can never be discarded because it is a part of you. The phrase "I have been here before" might be used, but I think the words "I am part of this new scene around me and it is part of me" might express it more clearly.

It was this experience that overtook me before I had been long in India. The how and the when I cannot say exactly. Perhaps those long talks cataloguing the library on hot-weather afternoons were a start. Then there were the hills, which once seen were always part of my consciousness.

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