Organismos internacionales

January 14, 1931

I HAVE developed strange habits in prison. One of these is the habit of getting up very early—

earlier even than the dawn. I began this last summer, for I liked to watch the coming of the dawn and the way it gradually put out the stars. Have you ever seen the moonlight before the dawn and the slow change to day ? Often I have watched this contest between the moonlight and the dawn, in which the dawn always wins. In the strange half-light it is difficult to say for some time whether it is the moonlight or the light of the coming day. And then almost suddenly there is no doubt of it and it is day, and the pale moon retires, beaten, from the contest.

According to my habit, I got up to-day when the stars were still out, and one could only guess that the morning was coming by that strange something which is in the air just before the dawn.

And as I sat reading, the calm of the early morning was broken by distant voices and rumblings, ever growing stronger. I remembered that it was the Sankranti day, the first big day of the Magh Mela, and the pilgrims were marching in their thousands for their morning dip at the Sangam, where the Ganga meets the Jumna and the invisible Sarasvati is also supposed to join them. And as they marched they sang and sometimes cheered mother Ganga—Ganga Mai ki Jai— and their voices reached me over the walls of Naini Prison. As I listened to them I thought of the power of faith which drew these vast numbers to the river and made them forget for a while their poverty and misery. And I thought how year after year, for how many hundreds or thousands of years, the pilgrims had marched to the Triveni. Men may come and men may go, and governments and empires may lord it awhile and then disappear into the past; but the old tradition continues, and generation after generation bows down to it. Tradition has much of good in it, but sometimes it becomes a terrible burden, which makes it difficult for us to move forward. It is fascinating to think of the unbroken chain which connects as with the dim and distant past, to read accounts of these melas written 1300 years ago—and the mela was an old tradition even then. But this chain has a way of clinging on to us when we want to move on, and of making us almost prisoners in the grip of this tradition. We shall have to keep many of the links with our past, but we shall also have to break through the prison of tradition wherever it prevents us from our onward march.

In our last three letters we have been trying to form a picture of what the world was like between 3000 and 2500 years ago. I have not mentioned any dates. I do not like them, and I do not want you to trouble yourself much with them. It is also difficult to know the correct dates of

happenings in these olden times. Later, it may be necessary occasionally to give and to remember a few dates to help

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us to keep the facts in proper order in our minds. For the present we are trying to form an idea of the ancient world.

We have had a glimpse of Greece and the Mediterranean, of Egypt, of Asia Minor and Persia.

Let us now come back to our own country. We have one great difficulty in studying the early history of India. The early Aryans here—or the Indo-Aryans as they are called—cared to write no histories. We have seen already in our earlier letters how great they were in many ways. The books they have produced—the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and

other books—could only have been written by great men. These books and other material help us in studying past history. They tell us about the manners and customs, the ways of thinking and living of our ancestors. But they are not accurate history. The only real history in Sanskrit, but of a much later period, is a history of Kashmir. This is called the Rajatarangini, the chronicle of the kings of Kashmir, and was written by Kalhana. You will be interested to learn that as I am writing these letters to you, Ranjit Pupha 1 is translating this great history of Kashmir from the Sanskrit. He has nearly finished half of it. It is a very big book. When the full translation appears we shall all, of course, read it eagerly, for unfortunately most of us do not know enough Sanskrit to read the original. We shall read it not only because it is a fine book, but also because it will tell us a great deal about the past, and especially about Kashmir, which, as you know, is our old homeland.

When the Aryans entered India, India was already civilized. Indeed, it now appears certain from the remains at Mohen-jo Daro in the north-west that a great civilization existed here for a long time before the Aryans came. But about this we do not know much yet. Probably within a few years we shall know more, when our archaeologists—the men who make a special study of old ruins—have dug out all that there is to be found there.

Even apart from this, however, it is clear that the Dravidians had a rich civilization then in southern India, and perhaps also in northern India. Their languages, which are not the daughters of the Aryan Sanskrit, are very old and have fine literatures. These languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese and Malayalam. All these languages still flourish in South India. Perhaps you know that the National Congress, unlike the British Government, has divided India on the basis of language. This is far better, as it brings one kind of people, speaking one language and generally having similar customs, into one provincial area. The Congress provinces in the south are the Andhra-desha or the Andhra province in northern Madras, where Telugu is spoken; the Tamil Nad, or the Tamil province where Tamil is spoken; the Karnataka, which is south of Bombay, and where Kannada or Kanarese is spoken; and Kerala, which corresponds roughly with Malabar, where Malayalam is spoken. There can be no doubt that in future provincial divisions of India a great deal of attention will be paid to the language of the area.

1 Ranjit S. Pandit, the author's brother-in-law, who was in prison with him at the time.

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Here I might as well say a little more about the languages of India. Some people in Europe and elsewhere imagine that there are hundreds of languages in India. This is perfectly absurd, and any one who gays so only shows his own ignorance. In a big country like India there are, of course, numerous dialects—that is, local variations of a language. There are also many hill tribes and other small groups in various parts of the country with special languages. But all these are unimportant when you take India as a whole. Only from the point of view of the census are they important. The real languages of India, as I think I mentioned in one of my earlier letters, belong to two families, the Dravidian, to which we have referred above, and the Indo-Aryan. The principal Indo-Aryan language was Sanskrit, and all the Indo-Aryan languages of India are daughters of Sanskrit. These are Hindi, Bengali, Gujrati, and Marathi. There are also some other variations. In Assam there is Assamese, and in Orissa or Utkal the Uriya language is used. Urdu

is a variation of Hindi. The word Hindustani is used to mean both Hindi and Urdu. Thus the principal languages of India are just ten. Hindustani, Bengali, Gujrati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, Malayalam, Uriya and Assamese. Of these, Hindustani, which is our mother-tongue, is spoken all over northern India—in the Punjab, United Provinces, Bihar, Central Provinces, Rajputana, Delhi and central India. This is a huge area inhabited by about 160,000,000 people.

So you see that already 150,000,000 speak Hindustani, with minor variations, and, as you know well, Hindustani is understood in most parts of India. It is likely to become the common

language of India. But this of course does not mean that the other principal languages, which I have mentioned above, should disappear. They should certainly remain as provincial languages, for they have fine literatures, and one should never try to take away a well-developed language from a people. The only way for a people to grow, for their children to learn, is through their own language. In India to-day everything is topsy-turvy, and we use English a great deal even amongst ourselves. It is perfectly ridiculous for me to write to you in English—and yet I am doing so I We shall get out of the habit soon, I hope.

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