What was it my parama gurudeva saw
in the rulers of the world, that recognized their weakness?
Those he admired to the end for their acuity
for their knowledge and science and philosophy
and for their language, its poets,
would dance one day to the tune of Nitai Gauranga
and the Holy Name, so he said.
With arms upraised and filled with joy, he said.
With their Bengali brethren, he said.
That Bengali brethren these civilized rulers thought
even lower than their own peasants back home.
They who thought themselves,
the very epitome of human attainment,
the very fruit of God's evolutionary desire tree,
Demonstrated by the time they could spend
choosing the correct clothing for the correct time of day
to .preserve the codes that marked
how the epitome of human civilization should behave:
perfect discipline in all things,.
The ruling class. Soldiers filled with disdain
Educated men, Eton Harrow Oxford Cambridge men,
with an educated curiosity, a sense of knowing
their own superiority in understanding
what the perfection of humanity should be,
along with an educated disdain for the penurious heathen,
the uneducated, the illiterate, the insular, the almost naked
even the best barely better than the lowest peasants
of their own island world.
Contempt even for the educated Indian,
even for the Anglophile Indian,
who was nothing better than a house servant
calquing his manners on the British master, inside and out,
what color of the skin made a difference
if one who had been thoroughly turned into Englishmen
equipped with the capacity to speak to the aristocrat
almost as an equal, but never as an equal,
always as a servant.
As a child, little Kedar went to gawk at the Mem Sahebs
and their clothing, the skirts and dresses and petticoats
the corsets, the bustles, up to their rouged faces and coiffed hair.
Witnessing the glitter of a society that consists of nothing but
polite talk with constant glib reference to the classics,
Latin, Greek, Shakespeare and the Good Book,
around tea, madeira or something stronger,
whatever the appropriate drink for the appropriate hour,
The uprightness, the discipline, the sharp intelligence
the inability to tolerate untruth,
who recognized truth as the force by which they ruled,
knowledge of weaponry, of military science
and then of all things technical and industrial,
overflowing into India with all the potential
of the modern world. What a glitter it was,
that glitters even stronger today in the global village..
So it was wisdom, some thought,
to recognize they could not be free
until they could play on the same pitch
with their masters,
they needed to master the crafts of the time
world standard. They needed to be able to compete..
Whom did Kedar meet that inspired him?
Was it Dall Saheb and the American Transcendentalists.
who could be persuaded that there was meaning in the Gita?
or a Jones who recognizes the divine beauty of the Gita Govinda,
or an Avalon entranced by the truth of Tantra,
that made him believe that the glory of spiritual India
would exercise its magic and triumph in the end?
Let the British strut and steer
with the energy of youth;
they would one day tire and turn inward
and yearn for the riches of the soul
that were the science that India had spent
dwelling on these many thousands of years..
The Thakur was an Anglophile
But the diet of Britishness, the meat,
the ever present spirits and cheroots,
finally brought him down.
He had served the powers
he knew the powers
he learned all he felt there was
to learn from the powers,
and in the end,
he believed he could meet them as equals on the turf of philosophy
of religious insight and practice, and show them the way.
If he was grateful to them for one thing
it was their devotion to Jesus
and aspiration for a universal brotherhood of man,
but he saw that they did not really know the science of love,
that thing the Savior of the East had brought.
They did not know the joy of prema bhakti,
the one lack that overrides all worldly attainments.
That is what he came to know and then to show.
Jai Bhaktivinoda Thakur.
