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WHITMAN IN INDIA
- University of Iowa Press
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v. K. CHARI Whitman in India Although Whitman left no visible mark on the literatures of modern India, and interest in him has been confined to the English-educated writers and scholars, he has always had a special appeal to the Indian people, together with Emerson and Thoreau. Indian readers have been quick to perceive affinities between Whitman's "Songs" of the self and the mystic utterances of the Gita and the Upanishads. We learn from Romain Rolland's Prophets ofNew India (1930) that Vivekananda called him "the Sannyasin ofIndia." Rabindranath Tagore, according to Emory Holloway, declared that "no American had caught the Oriental spirit ofmysticism so well as [Whitman]." I William Norman Guthrie, himselfimpressed by the Vedantic parallels in Whitman, in 1897 quoted an Indian as saying that Whitman "must have studied the Bhagavad Gita, for in Leaves of Grass one finds the teachings of Vedanta; the Song of Myself is but an echo of the sayings of Krishna."2 Later, Ananda Coomaraswamy, in his Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (1916), pointed out many parallels in "Song of Myself' to Buddhist ideas. Sri Aurobindo, the sage of Pondicherry, compared Whitman to the "old Indian seers": "That which the old Indian seers called the mahan atma, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast strain of cosmic thought and cosmic life, is the subject of some of his strains"strains in which "one of the seers of old tJne reborn in ours might have expressed himself." 3 Sri Chinmoy, another spiritual leader of our time, also thinks of Whit- [396 ] man as a seer who "peers into Truth ... dynamically fronting ... Reality."4 In addition to Rabindranath Tagore and Aurobindo, there were three early regional Indian writers who were impressed by Whitman's poetry. Kshitindranath Tagore (1869-1937), a noted Bengali essayist and thinker and a member of the Tagore family, was inspired by Leaves of Grass to write an essay on Whitman in Bengali in 1891.5 However, he saw Whitman's value as a prophet of democracy rather than as a mystic. The Tamil national poet Bharati (1880-1921) wrote an essay in Tamil praising Whitman for liberating verse from conventional prosody and for developing an all-embracing vision of the world. Himself a Vedantist of sorts, Bharati also noticed the similarities between Whitman and Vedantic thought. V. Sachithanandan's Whitman and Bharati: A Comparative Study (1978) examines the affinities between the two writers in terms of their theistic, rather than nondualistic , Vedantic thought, and their erotic mysticism, which he calls "bridal mysticism." The Punjabi poet Puran Singh also wrote in praise ofWhitman in his The Spirit ofOriental Poetry (1926), remarking on his "immensity" and his "cosmic consciousness." Thus it is the spiritual aspect of Whitman's poetry that attracted most Indian thinkers ofthe early generations and that still continues to engage the attention of Indian academics, rather than his democratic or purely humanitarian message or his futuristic vision of the New World apparent in poems such as "Passage to India ." It is also noteworthy that none of those features of his poetry, such as his egocentrism (which struck his contemporaries as insane or eccentric and provoked the bitterest attacks upon him), ever bothered Indian readers, for they could readily absorb such elements, including his erotic ecstasies, into one or another of their own mystical traditions. These very elements seem to have evoked the most sympathetic response in them. This perception ofWhitman as a sage and a mystic is by no means confined to Indian readers. Even the early commentators, friends, and reviewers ofWhitman were struck by the parallels to Oriental literature in his poetry. It was this mystical strain in him that, one suspects, inspired Emerson's initial enthusiasm for his poems. When Thoreau received a copy from Whitman of his 1856 edition, he remarked that certain poems, specifically «Song ofMyself' and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," were "wonderfully like the Orientals" (meaning the Hindu poems). Whitman's work reminded Edward Carpenter of "the subtle and profound passages " in the Upanishads, and he remarked that the poet "seems to liberate the good tidings and give it democratic scope and worldwide application unknown in the older prophets, even in the sayings of Buddha."6 More recently, Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to the reissue ofthe 1855 Leaves, not only hailed "Song of Myself' as a great mystical poem and Whitman's «miracle" but asserted that it is best understood when studied in relation to the mystical...