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Toward the Future

ALL MY LIFE I have looked forward. Large-scale prophecy, however, is as dangerous as it is easy, and true prophetic vision is rare indeed. It is a rarity more than ever marked in an epoch such as ours, in which science has placed in our reach material and natural powers undreamed of fifty short years ago. But since the human mind and the human imagination are as yet by no means fully equipped to master the immense forces which human ingenuity has discovered and unleashed, it is not too difficult to foresee at least some of the political and social reactions of nations as well as individuals to this enormous scientific and technical revolution and all its accompanying phenomena.

India, the country of my birth and upbringing, has been for centuries a land of extreme poverty, misery and want, where millions are born, live and work and die at a level far below the margin of subsistence. A tropical climate, aeons of soil erosion, and primitive and unskilled methods of agriculture have all taken their toll of suffering, patient, gentle but ignorant mankind. The Indian peasant has survived and multiplied but in face of the most ferocious and formidable handicaps. Many years ago, in my first book, India in Transition, I gave this account of the day-to-day life of the ordinary Indian peasant under British rule.

A typical rural scene on an average day in an average year is essentially the same now as it was half a century ago. A breeze, alternately warm and chilly, sweeps over the monotonous landscape as it is lightened by a rapid dawn, to be followed quickly by a heavy molten sun appearing on the horizon. The ill-clad villagers, men, women, and children, thin and weak, and made old beyond their years by a life of underfeeding and overwork, have been astir before daybreak, and have partaken of a scanty meal, consisting of some kind or other of cold porridge, of course without sugar or milk. With bare and hardened feet they reach the fields and immediately begin to furrow the soil with their lean cattle, of a poor and hybrid breed, usually sterile and milkless. A short rest at midday, and a handful of dried corn or beans for food, is followed by a continuance till dusk of the same laborious scratching of the soil. Then the weary way homeward in the chilly evening, every member of the family shaking with malaria or fatigue. A drink of water, probably contaminated, the munching of a piece of hard black or green chaupati, a little gossip round the peepul tree, and then the day ends with heavy, unrefreshing sleep in dwellings so insanitary that no decent European farmer would house his cattle in them.

The Raj has gone, but in essentials the life and lot of the humble villager of rural India have scarcely changed since I wrote these words. Education, hygiene, welfare schemes, plans for village "uplift" have but scratched the surface of the problem, hardly more deeply or more efficiently than the peasant's own wooden plough scratches the sunbaked soil of India. Nor is the lot of his urban kinsman, working in one of the great and ever-growing industrial cities like Bombay or Calcutta, much better. At his factory, in his home, the Indian industrial worker endures, and takes for granted, utterly appalling conditions. From steamy, overcrowded mill or factory he trudges to the shanty or tenement, equally overcrowded, equally unhealthy, which serves him as his home. His diet, though more varied than that of his cousin in the country, is pitifully meager by any Western standard. Around him are the increasing distractions of a great city, but they have little meaning for him. His amenities are few, his luxuries nonexistent.

During the years of British rule it was relatively easy to shrug off responsibility for the economic malaise of India, to put all the blame on imperialist exploitation, and to say, "When we get our independence, then we shall put economic conditions right." The imperialists have gone; the period of alien exploitation is over. But can economic injustice be so easily righted? India's population is stead ily and rapidly increasing, yet at the present rate -- and in spite of all manner of schemes for soil conservation, irrigation, better use of land, intensive and planned industrialization -- it is unlikely that more than half the natural increase in population can be economically absorbed. India's problem, like China's, is one of economic absorptive capacity. Pakistan's problem, since she has the empty but potentially rich acres of Baluchistan to fill with her surplus population, is less pressing. Doubtless in India, as in China, the extension of education and growing familiarity with the use of the vote and the processes of democracy will give rise to eager and energetic efforts to find political solutions to the gravest economic problems. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions of human beings in India and in China live out their lives in conditions of extreme misery. How long will these vast masses of humanity accept such conditions? May they not -- as realization dawns of their own political power -- insist on an extreme form of socialism, indeed on communism, though not on Soviet Russian lines and not under Soviet leadership? And may not that insistence be revolutionary in its expression and in its manifestations?

Yet in India, as well as in China, if every "have" in the population were stripped of wealth and reduced to the level of the lowest "have not," of the poorest sweeper or coolie, the effect on the general standard of living -- the general ill-being -- would be negligible. There are far too few "haves," far too many "have nots," in both countries for even the most wholesale redistribution of wealth as it now stands. Reform, to be real and effective, must strike much deeper. These are thoughts grim enough to depress anyone who possesses more than the most superficial knowledge of Asia's problems and difficulties.

There is one major political step forward which should be taken by the Governments of India and Pakistan, which would have a significant and beneficial effect on the life and welfare of their peoples. This is the establishment of a genuine and lasting entente cordiale between the two countries, such as subsisted between Britain and France from 1905 to 1914. Even more pertinent analogies are offered by Belgium and Holland, and Sweden and Norway. Here are two pairs of neighboring sovereign states, once joined and now separated. The separation of the Low Countries offers the nearest parallel since this was effected on the specific grounds of religious difference. I have earlier likened the Hindu and Muslim communities of the old Indian Empire to Siamese twins; as such they were, before they were parted, hardly able to move; now separate, surely they ought to be able to go along together as companions and friends, to their mutual benefit and support.

Here however it is for India with its far greater population, resources, and developed industries to show the same political judgment as Sweden showed toward Norway after their separation -- that is to say -- a final and sincere acceptance of the partition as desirable and in itself as at last opening the door to a real understanding between the two culturally different peoples of the subcontinent.

Even a small minority can make great mischief if it keeps up and repeats the political slogans of unity which may have had a sense at one time but which today can only prevent that good neighborly relation on which future co-operation in international politics depends.

In problems such as water, both east and west between the two republics of India and Pakistan, refugee property and other financial claims and counterclaims should be settled now in a way that the weaker country of the two shall not feel that it has been browbeaten and unjustly treated by its vast and powerful neighbor.

The problem of Kashmir should also be faced as an honest attempt to bring about by plebiscite, under international auspices, a final settlement on the basis of the triumph of the popular will. Were India to adopt consistently toward Pakistan the policy adopted by Sweden toward Norway, by Holland toward Belgium, not only for years but for decades, not only peace in Southern Asia but the full weight for international peace and good will will necessarily increase to an extent of which we at present can have little idea. The great role to be played as bridge between West and East beyond the frontiers of Pakistan and India can only be accomplished if and when these two neighbors are themselves capable of co-operation and such fair dealing toward each other as will con vince the rest of the world that they have a claim to be listened to and seriously considered.

The alternative to an Indian policy of understanding and the encouragement of water and other economic needs of Pakistan, not only justly, but with free comprehension, can be that the neighbor will turn in other directions for alliances and friendships -- the result of which must lead to these two neighborly powers, instead of looking outward and working for world peace, watching each other, ever on the look-out for danger and discord rather than for peaceful and economic independence and development.

I do not think that the countries of the Near East, with the possible exception of Egypt, face any population problems which, granted courage, resolution and ingenuity, should prove insuperable.

All that the people of countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Yemen and even Saudi Arabia, need is knowledge -- knowledge of new techniques, knowledge of engineering, knowledge of agriculture. They have room and resources enough. Science properly applied can repopulate their empty lands and make their barren spaces flourish; can plant cities, fertilize crops; can set up industries and develop their immensely rich mineral and raw material potentialities. Here there was once the Garden of Eden; historians and archaeologists have shown that this region was at one time fertile, rich and populous. So it can be again, if the powers and the resources available to mankind now are properly employed. The Arab lands have been devastated by centuries of folly, by waste and extravagance due to ignorance; the pitiful condition of their peoples today is a condemnation of their past. There is no need to look further than Israel to realize what courage and determination, allied to skill and urgent need, can achieve. The Arabs are no whit inferior to any race in the world in intelligence and potential capacity. A single generation's concentrated and devoted attention to the real needs of education for all, of scientific and technical as well as academic teaching, training and discipline, could revolutionize the Arab world. Self-help is better by far than grants in aid, and better than perpetual outpouring by the United States of its surplus pro duction. The Arabs' only danger lies in continued apathy and ignorance in a swiftly changing world, and in a social and economic outlook and practices unadapted to the challenging realities of our time.

I have little fear about the impact of the future of the British Crown Colonies in Africa. We have seen the noble work of Great Britain in West Africa. In East and Central Africa the problem is at present complicated by the presence of a European settler population. I believe that there can be a healthy and satisfactory adjustment, provided all sections in these multiracial communities -- indigenous Africans and immigrant Europeans and Asians -- face the simple, fundamental fact that they are all dependent upon each other. No one section can dismiss any other from its calculations, either about contributions to past development or about plans for the future. The immigrant, be he European or Asian, has no hope of prosperity without the Africans; the African cannot do without the European farmer or the Asian trader, unless he wants to see his standard of living fall steeply, and with it all hope of exploiting and enhancing the natural wealth of the land in which all three have their homes and must earn their bread.

To a Muslim there is one quietly but forcibly encouraging element in this situation. Wherever the indigenous population is Muslim, there is remarkably little racial antagonism or sense of bitterness against the European, in spite of the European's obvious economic superiority. Islam, after all, is a soil in which sentiments of this sort do not take root or flourish easily. This is not a shallow and fatalistic resignation; it is something much more profound in the essence of the teaching of Islam -- a basic conviction that in the eyes of God all men, regardless of color or class or economic condition, are equal. From this belief there springs an unshakable self-respect, whose deepest effects are in the subconscious, preventing the growth of bitterness or any sense of inferiority or jealousy by one man of another's economic advantage.

Islam in all these countries has within it, I earnestly believe, the capacity to be a moral and spiritual force of enormous significance, both stabilizing and energizing the communities among whom it is preached and practiced. To ignore Islam's potential influence for good, Islam's healing and creative power for societies as for individuals, is to ignore one of the most genuinely hopeful factors that exist in the world today.

But what of the recurrent, intractable issue of peace or war? Few epochs in recent history have been more devastating and disastrous than (to quote a phrase of Sir Winston Churchill's) "this tormented half-century." Is the long torment at last over?

I can only hope fervently, with all my being, that this is so; that the nations and their leaders are sincerely and actively convinced not only of the negative proposition that a Third World War would effect the destruction of civilization, perhaps indeed of humanity, but of its positive corollary that it now lies within men's power enormously and rapidly to enhance and increase civilization and to promote the material well-being of millions who now rank as "have nots." The only chance of nations and individuals alike among the "have nots" lies in the preservation of peace. Europe needs a century or more of recuperation after the agony and havoc that its peoples have endured, and recuperation means peace. The industrial and productive capacity of North America -- the United States and Canada -- already vaster than anything the world has ever seen, is increasing fast; North America needs markets; and markets mean peace. The underdeveloped countries, in Africa, Asia and South America, need over the years a vast and steady inflow of capital investment -- to build and develop their communications, to exploit their resources, to raise their standard of living -- and investment on this scale and to this end calls for peace. War, in face of such circumstances and so numerous and so imperative a series of needs, would be madness. But I must admit that if we look back at the history of the past fifty years, this has not been a consideration that has deflected the nations and their leaders from catastrophic courses. All the hardly won prosperity and security, all the splendid and beckoning hopes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century counted for nothing when the crucial test came. Pride and folly swayed men's hearts. The world's state today is the result of pride and folly.

As Germany did for so long, Russia now supplies the civilized world's great enigma, the riddle to which there seems no sensible or satisfactory answer. One factor in Russia's perplexing equation is obvious and known -- the factor whose results can only be happy, peaceful and prosperous. The other -- the perpetual "x" -- is grim and incalculable. Long ago Lord Palmerston said that Russian history taught this lesson: the Russians must expand, and they will go on expanding until they encounter some force -- a nation or a combination of nations -- powerful enough to stop them. From its beginnings in the Grand Duchy of Moscow Russia has expanded steadily and remorselessly. Is expansion still the dominant motive in Russian policy? There are some somber indications that this is one of the many characteristics which Communist Russia possesses in common with Czarist Russia and that her appetite for expansion is still not glutted.

Yet why should this be so? Are there not other more peaceful factors at work? Russia's empty lands, within her own borders, are greater by far than those that opened up, decade after decade, in front of the pioneers who extended the United States from small, precarious beginnings along the Atlantic seaboard. Russia has no need of overseas colonies, no need, now that aerial communications have developed so swiftly and so powerfully, for those "windows on warm seas" which once mattered so much. Inside her own frontiers, if her leaders can be genuinely convinced that no one menaces the Soviet Union, that no one harbors aggressive, imperialist designs against her, her people may live at peace for centuries. Will these realistic and wholesome considerations carry the day, or will suspicion, blind hatred, pride and folly wreak new and more terrible havoc? As in the German people before the Second World War there was the dreadful, Wagnerian death-wish, driving a great and superbly talented nation to self-immolation, so is there in the heart of all men some dark, satanic evil still lusting for destruction? These are the stern riddles of our time, and each of us seeks his own answers to them.

But these issues and questions concern men in the aggregate, great bodies of men in national and racial groups. The biggest group, however, is only composed of the number of individuals in it. If it is possible to bring happiness to one individual, in him at least the dark and evil impulses may be conquered. And in the end may not the power of good in the individual prevail against the power of evil in the many?

I can only say to everyone who reads this book that it is my profound conviction that man must never ignore and leave untended and undeveloped that spark of the Divine which is in him. The way to personal fulfillment, to individual reconciliation with the Universe that is about us, is comparatively easy for anyone who firmly and sincerely believes, as I do, that Divine Grace has given man in his own heart the possibilities of illumination and of union with Reality. It is, however, far more important to attempt to offer some hope of spiritual sustenance to those many who, in this age in which the capacity of faith is nonexistent in the majority, long for something beyond themselves, even if it seems second-best. For them there is the possibility of finding strength of the spirit, comfort and happiness in contemplation of the infinite variety and beauty of the Universe.

Life in the ultimate analysis has taught me one enduring lesson. The subject should always disappear in the object. In our ordinary affections one for another, in our daily work with hand or brain, most of us discover soon enough that any lasting satisfaction, any contentment that we can achieve, is the result of forgetting self, of merging subject with object in a harmony that is of body, mind and spirit. And in the highest realms of consciousness all who believe in a Higher Being are liberated from all the clogging and hampering bonds of the subjective self in prayer, in rapt meditation upon and in the face of the glorious radiance of eternity, in which all temporal and earthly consciousness is swallowed up and itself becomes the eternal.