HT This Day: January 10, 1933 -- Bernard Shaw blinks at India

His desire not to undertake an extensive tour of the country is perfectly logical; one cannot expect a man like Bernard Shaw to knock about like an American tourist, seeing India in eight days with the help of Thomas Cook and Company.

George Bernard Shaw is a host in himself. That must be the only substantial impression of the man, left in the minds of the Indian Pressmen, who went to interview him on board ship soon after the Empress of Britain arrived at Bombay. As is their custom, they asked him many questions, ranging from untouchability to world disarmament to which, of course, they were not denied replies. But they forgot to ask Shaw one thing, in fact, the most important thing: why has he included India in the itinerary of his world tour? His desire not to undertake an extensive tour of the country is perfectly logical; one cannot expect a man like Bernard Shaw to knock about like an American tourist, seeing India in eight days with the help of Thomas Cook and Company. Shaw could never be expected to do anything so idiotic Unique, but not abnormal as he has always claimed to be, he would prefer to loll in his deck-chair on board a luxury liner, and wait for us to go and have his darshan. And that is exactly what he meant when he told the Pressmen that he was “on show” and had no objection to pilgrimage from all corners of the Indian continent to the Empress of Britain. Shaw has explained to his own satisfaction that he has not come to India on a public tour, but he has yet to explain, to the satisfaction of his admirers in India, why he has come at all.

HT This Day: January 10, 1933 -- Bernard Shaw blinks at India

The Super-Iconoclast

In this ancient land of strange contrasts, but of stable and unchanging traditions, the presence, even though for a short time of the world’s super-iconoclast may appear somewhat of an anachronism. Even those of us, who have for long admired his wit and drank at the bubbling spring of his intellectual genius, and it difficult to fit him into any Indian scene or mode of thought. In his own time and in his own inimitable fashion, he tried hard to change the ideas of the English people. He wrote plays to explain his views, wrote prefaces to explain his plays and talked endlessly to explain his prefaces. He is not a dramatist by predestination, but he is a born talker, although, paradoxically enough, he tells us to make public peaking a capital offence when we get Swaraj. The reason why he turned to the theatre and not to anything else was that it happened at that time to provide him with an admirable opening for converting the English race to his own opinions! And as soon as he won the public ear by jest, he proceeded to preach into it.

The measure of violence of the shock he was able to inflict on an unprepared public by his dangerous doctrines became also to measure of his notoriety. But were he try to his shock tactics on India, he would not succeed, simply because people here will refuse so take in earnest what he utters in jest and incidentally, refuse to be insulted. But it will be wrong to infer that India has no need for somebody who can shake her out of intellectual inertia, caused by a slavish imitation of Western ideals and social institutions. India does not suffer from romanticism, as Shaw mistakenly thinks; what she really suffers from is a temporary loss of intellectual integrity in politics and ethics. Shaw has always believed in the normality of his own vision alone, assuming that nine-tenths of mankind are defective in normal intellectual sight But Shaw has not as yet tested this particular belief of his on the touchstone of Indian wisdom.

No Ragging, Please

Now in the evening of a life brilliantly and aggressively lived, he has come really close to the region where he can easily have it tested, if he so desires. And after he has tested, should he still desire to preach, we will have no complaint. He gives us the message of the “strong” man and asks us to produce Mussolini, and thereby betrays that he has seen our surface and not the bottom. He is welcome to set us laughing at our idiosyncrasies and follies, but we may not expect to change our outlook simply through the medium of waggery. His doctrine of comedy as a kind of special ragging will not work here. Laughter is not in India, as in the West, a social necessity, having for its avowed object, the chastisement at silliness or ignorance. The mixing up of gray - messages with rasping aspersions the typically Shavian mixed delivery of goods-is not understood in this country.