Dhan Gopal Mukerji was the first Indian writer to obtain fame in America at the beginning of last century. Here are some quotations from his book, Caste and Outcaste, Stanford University Press, 2002. I was tickled by the one about his geography textbook.
134. Once at Benares I stopped to bathe in the Ganges and I saw an old priest who had taken his bath and was meditating. Two Americans, a man and a woman, came along rushing. The man pointed his camera at him, and said reassuringly, "Don't be scared; it won't bite!" Then snapping his picture, he hastily put a coin in the old man's hand and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. The priest, who had been meditating upon the Lord, looked at the coin, then looked at the disappearing couple. In silence he threw the coin over his shoulder into the water.
118. One day I was waiting on the platform in a railway station in India. After three hours the train was heard. It stopped at a distance and whistled for the signal to come into the station. The man who gives the signals was eating his dinner and he grumbled:
- What does he want, the fool, screeching like that?
- He wants a signal to come to the platform - someone said.
- Then let him wait till I've finished my dinner - replied the man crossly.
141. The first American I met on landing was a man very quaintly dressed (later on I learned he was wearing "overalls"), who had been sent to me to take care of my trunk. I gave him my trunk, which he threw from the deck of the ship down to the wharf - a matter of some eight or ten feet. Not knowing enough colloquial English, I quoted to him the magnificent lines of Milton:
"Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong
flaming from the ethereal sky."
The expressman looked at me very quizically and exclaimed: "Cut it out! You're too fresh!" This was my initiation into America.
53. When I was about ten years old, my father sent me to a Scotch Presbyterian school. He said, “I have discovered a saint in the head of the school. I want you to learn Christianity. If you are convinced it is wrong, fight it; if you are convinced it is right, embrace it!”
When my training was over, I brought a picture of Christ to my mother while she was meditating and asked: “Why do you meditate in the presence of a false god? This is the real God I have found.”
She said, “I have heard of Him from others. He has no quarrel with my God. This is only another name.”
We pushed the image of Vishnu a little to one side, put the picture of Christ by his side in the sacred niche in the wall and burned incense and meditated before Him too. My mother said, “He who brings about a quarrel between God and God is a more dangerous sinner than he who causes war between man and man. God is one. We have given Him many names. Why should we quarrel about names?”
56. My grandfather taught me poetry. His memory was going when I was nine or ten, and in order to exercise it, he taught poetry to me. Now, in the Scotch school they gave me a book to study, called geography, and there was no end of talk about places. One day I was reading about Calcutta. I showed my geography to my grandfather and said to him, “We are reading about our own city”, and then I gave him a list of our export and import trade.
“But that is not geography,” said the old man, “I have it in an ancient book and I will show you.” So he went and got Kalidassa’s Cloud Messenger (Meghdhoot). He read and translated to me the following tale from the Sanskrit:
“A Titan was employed in the Himalayas by God to look after the treasury, but he defaulted and was exiled a whole year at the southern point of India. Being homesick, he wanted to send a message to his wife, but had no messenger. Suddenly he saw the July monsoon cloud rising from the Indian Ocean. ‘I’ll send a message through this cloud’.
So he said: ‘In the first flush of July the clouds rise; as the elephant charges the mountains with its tusks, so the cloud charges the sky with its tusks of lightning. O you born of the sun of the gods! O sun of the wandering heavens, take this message to my wife, and as you go, I will tell you how to reach my home!’
Then he gave his directions: ‘When you come to the blue mountains, you feel the breeze becoming different. The wind caresses you. The white cranes make eye-pleasing circles before you. Peacocks stand on branches of the trees, their fans outspread, dancing to the drumming of thunder. At last you reach the Himalayas. And you will see where the rainbow bends its glory to make an entrance for the gods. You will find a woman there whose bracelets are too big for her wrists, because she has grown thin, longing for me. She is my wife.’
‘That’, said my grandfather, ‘is geography, not exports and imports’.”
76. The holy man used to play with us children, and his favourite game was a sort of blind man’s buff. He would blindfold all the children and would walk around stealthily like a cat, jingling his trident with its rings from time to time. The children always failed to catch him. At the end he would say, ‘Thus we perceive God here and there, but we can never reach him.’
I asked him, “Why do good people suffer in this world?” He said, “When you pray for rain, you also pray for the thunderbolt.”
