THE MODERN REVIEW
No. 3
No. 225
THE CULT OF THE CHARKA
By Rabindranath Tagore.
Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray has marked me with his censure in printer’s ink, for that I have been unable to display enthusiasm in the turning of the Charka. But, because it is impossible for him to be pitiless to me even when awarding punishment, he has provided me with a companion in my ignominy in the illustrious person of Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal. That has taken away the pain of it and also given me fresh proof of the eternal human truth, that we are in agreement with some people and with some others we are not. It only proves that while creating man’s mind, God did not have for his model the spider mentality doomed to a perpetual conformity in its production of web and that it is an outrage upon human nature to force it through a mill and reduce it to some standardised commodity of uniform size and shape and purpose.
When in my younger days I used to go boating on the river, the boatmen of Jagannath Ghat would swarm around, each pressing on me the service of his own particular vessel. My selection once made, however, there would be no further trouble; for, if the boats were many so were the passengers, and the places to go to were likewise various. But suppose one of the boats had been specially hall-marked, as the one and only sacred ferry by some dream emanating from the shrine of Tarakeswar. Then indeed it would have been difficult to withstand the extortions of its touts, despite the inner conviction of the travelers, that though the shore opposite may be one, its landing places are many and diversely situate.
Our shastras tell us that the divine shakti is many-sided so that a host of different factors operate in the work of creation. In death these merge into sameness; for chaos alone is uniform. God has given to man the same many-sided shakti for which reason the civilisation of his creation have their divine wealth of diversity. It is God’s purpose that in the societies of man the various should be strung together into a garland of unity; while often the mortal providence of our public life, greedy for particular results, seeks to knead them all into a lump of uniformity. That is why we see in the concerns of this world so many identically-liveried, machine-made workers, so many marionettes pulled by the same string: and on the other hand, wherever the human spirit has not been reduced to the coldness of collapse, we also see perpetual rebelliousness against this mechanical mortar-pounded homogeneity.
If in any country we find no symptom of such rebellion, if we find its people submissively or contentedly prone on the dust, in dumb terror of some master’s bludgeon, or blind acceptance of some guru’s injunction, then indeed should we know that for such a country, in extremis, it is high time to mourn.
In our country, this ominous process of being leveled down into sameness has long
